May 20, 1959: Mild-mannered Wally Moses gets only ejection of 34-year major-league career

In a distinguished career as a player, coach, and scout – a career that began during the presidency of Herbert Hoover and ended under Gerald Ford – Wally Moses probably saw just about everything that can happen on a baseball diamond at least once.

One of the rarest events he ever witnessed – and a very personal one – took place in the first game of a May 20, 1959, doubleheader between the Cincinnati Reds and Los Angeles Dodgers. Just two batters into the contest, Moses, the Reds’ first-base coach, disputed a bang-bang play and was thrown out of the game by first-base umpire Frank Secory.

According to Retrosheet, it was Moses’ only ejection in 34 years in a major-league uniform, a career divided evenly between playing and coaching.1 Moses said the streak went back even further, that he’d never been thrown out of a game in his minor-league days. (He spent four seasons in the minors before reaching the big leagues in 1935.2)

Moses also worked as a scout and a roving organizational hitting coach before retiring at the end of the 1975 season. Assuming he was never ejected in either of those roles – which seems likely, as neither is directly involved in gameplay – Secory’s thumbing was the only one Moses received in a baseball career spanning 45 years.

The occasion for the mild-mannered Moses’ outburst wasn’t the high pressure of a pennant race. The Dodgers were just 36 games into their season; their 19-17 record tied them with the Chicago Cubs for third place, one-one-hundredth of a percentage point behind second-place San Francisco and 4½ games behind the first-place Milwaukee Braves. Cincinnati had played 33 games and compiled a 17-16 record, putting them in fifth place, five games back. The teams had gone head-to-head in Cincinnati from May 1 through 4, with the Reds winning three of four games. The May 20 doubleheader wrapped up another four-game set, with the Dodgers and Reds splitting the first two.

Lefty Danny McDevitt started on the mound for manager Walter Alston’s Dodgers. He entered with a 2-2 record and a 3.78 ERA, including a complete-game 7-1 win over the Reds in the second game of a doubleheader on May 3. Opposing him for Cincinnati was righty Brooks Lawrence, who had a 3-3 record and a 5.67 ERA coming in. Lawrence had started against the Dodgers in the first game on May 3, working eight effective innings but missing out on a decision in a 6-3 Reds win.

The crowd of 32,252 fans would have packed the house in some major-league ballparks. Indeed, some of those fans might have been turned away at the Reds’ home, Crosley Field, which held about 30,000. But plenty of seats remained available at lopsided Memorial Coliseum, the Dodgers’ temporary home for their first several seasons in Los Angeles, with its capacity of 94,600.3

The first game started in straightforward fashion, as McDevitt fanned Johnny Temple. Second-year center fielder Vada Pinson batted next, just beginning a season in which he led the National League with 47 doubles and 131 runs scored and made the NL team for both All-Star Games. Pinson, not yet 21 years old, also stole 21 bases for the Reds, the first of 12 major-league seasons in which he posted double-digit steal totals.4

Pinson grounded to second baseman Charlie Neal, who threw to first baseman Norm Larker. It was a close play at the bag. Secory gave the out signal; Moses dissented. He kicked the first-base bag while complaining – the last straw for Secory, who ejected Moses.5 Fellow coach Clyde King, later a major-league manager, took over first-base coaching duties just five minutes into the game.6 The inning ended on Pete Whisenant’s grounder to Jim Gilliam at third base.

Future Hall of Famer Duke Snider began the scoring in the bottom of the second with a 375-foot homer to right field. According to news accounts, it was the lefty-swinging Snider’s first home run to right at home since the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles for the 1958 season.7 The Reds put two runners on in the third, helped when Snider dropped a fly ball for an error.8 But Temple’s fly out and another, apparently uncontroversial, Pinson groundball stranded them.

The home team pieced together another run in the third, starting with a bunt single by Gilliam. Neal reached first on a force play and moved to second on a walk to Ron Fairly. Snider collected his second RBI of the game with a single to right. It was the Dodgers’ sixth hit off Lawrence.

The Reds, hitless through four innings, pulled even in the fifth. Left fielder Jim Pendleton led off with a single. Two outs later, pitcher Lawrence doubled him home. It was Lawrence’s only double of the year, and the last of five in his seven-year major-league career. Temple’s bad-hop single9 scored Lawrence to tie the game at 2-2. Temple moved to second on the throw home but was stranded as Pinson’s fly ended the inning.

A pair of singles and a wild pitch put Dodgers runners on second and third in the sixth, but Lawrence got Rip Repulski, batting for shortstop Bob Lillis, to pop foul to third base. The Reds also put runners on second and third with one out in the top of the seventh. McDevitt walked Temple intentionally to get to Pinson. First-pitch swinging,10 the center fielder prolonged a frustrating day by grounding into an inning-ending double play, shortstop to catcher to first base. Pinson ended the day 0-for-5.

With Lawrence still laboring, the Dodgers put the game away in the bottom of the seventh. One-out singles by Gilliam and Neal put Los Angeles runners on first and third. Fairly’s grounder to Temple at second base could have ended the inning. But Temple made a poor feed to shortstop Roy McMillan covering second – one scribe called it “an error that didn’t show on the scorecard” – and second-base ump Hal Dixon ruled Neal safe at second.11 Gilliam scored and Fairly was out on McMillan’s throw to first.

After an intentional walk to Snider, Don Demeter singled to score Neal for a 4-2 Dodgers lead. Second-year righty reliever Bob Mabe took over for Lawrence and coughed up a run-scoring single to Larker and a three-run homer to catcher Joe Pignatano, his only round-tripper of the season. Replacement shortstop Don Zimmer struck out to end the inning, but the home team boasted an 8-2 lead.

The Reds picked up two more runs in the eighth on Whisenant’s single, Frank Robinson’s triple to right field, and Frank Thomas’s sacrifice fly. Against McDevitt in the ninth, the Reds managed two more singles by Temple and Whisenant, but Robinson struck out to wrap up the game in 2 hours and 29 minutes. The scrappy Temple followed the game-ending strikeout by engaging in a “violent argument” with home-plate umpire Frank Dascoli, and was subsequently fined $75.12

Cincinnati avenged itself in the nightcap, winning 7-5 behind a complete game from former Dodgers star Don Newcombe on the 10th anniversary of his National League debut.13 Secory, umpiring behind the plate, ejected Reds catcher Jerry Lynch in the seventh inning for protesting a fair/foul call on a grounder. That brought the total number of ejections for the series to four, all of them Cincinnati players. Dixon, working home plate in the first game on May 18, thumbed Reds pitcher Joe Nuxhall for bench jockeying and Thomas for arguing balls and strikes.

At least one sportswriter – Bob Shafer of the Pasadena (California) Independent – called out the umpires for their apparent readiness to eject. Shafer noted that Moses “barely had time to say a couple of words” before being shown the door and cited other instances of umpires being quick to take offense with players. “An umpire is an integral part of the show,” he wrote, “but more and more of them these days seem to be laboring under the misdirected notion that they are THE show.”14

The Dodgers nosed out Milwaukee for the NL pennant, then beat the Chicago White Sox in six games to win the World Series. Cincinnati finished the season tied with the Chicago Cubs for fifth place, 13 games back with a 74-80 record.

Moses remained a Reds coach through the 1960 season, then held coaching and scouting roles with the New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers, and Philadelphia Phillies. In a minor confluence of fate, Moses’ final day as a uniformed major-league coach – October 1, 1970 – was also the final day of Secory’s 19-season umpiring career.15

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Thomas Merrick and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources and photo credit

In addition to the specific sources cited in the Notes, the author used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites for general player, team, and season data and the box scores for this game. Doug Skipper’s SABR Biography Project article on Wally Moses also served as a primary source for this article.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/LAN/LAN195905201.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1959/B05201LAN1959.htm

Image of 1960 Cincinnati Reds postcard (unnumbered) featuring Wally Moses downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 In his 1970 book My Turn at Bat, Ted Williams recounted an anecdote in which umpire Red Jones cleared the Chicago White Sox bench, including Moses, for heckling. (The anecdote is retold in Moses’ SABR biography.) Clearing the bench, however, is not the same as ejection. Under major-league rules, substitute players who are ordered to the clubhouse are still eligible to be inserted into the game.

2 Si Burick, “Redleg Notes,” Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, May 21, 1959: 23; Jim Galbraith, “Dodgers Split with Reds,” Pasadena (California) Independent, May 21, 1959: C1. As of the time this story was written in the summer of 2023, information on minor-league ejections was not available through Retrosheet or Baseball-Reference, so we are left with Moses’ word to go on. Based on his major-league record of good behavior, the claim seems believable enough.

3 Philip J. Lowry, Green Cathedrals, 5th edition (Phoenix: Society for American Baseball Research, 2019), 90, 171.

4 Pinson’s highest single-season steals total was 32, achieved in 1960. In another sign of his speed, he twice led the NL in triples, in 1963 (14) and 1967 (13).

5 Burick, “Redleg Notes.” The phrasing of the anecdote suggests that Moses, not Secory, was the one giving the postgame explanation. Several independently written game accounts from Los Angeles and Cincinnati-area newspapers do not quote Secory.

6 “Mayo Unhappy Over Twin Bill,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 21, 1959: 1D.

7 “Reds, Dodgers Divide Doubleheader,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 21, 1959: 1D; Frank Finch, “Dodgers, Reds Divide Before 32,252,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1959: Sports, 1. Right field at Memorial Coliseum was considerably more spacious than it had been at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. In Brooklyn, Snider posted five seasons of 40 or more home runs. His peak in Los Angeles was 23 homers in 1959, though age and injury also contributed to his lower power numbers. The claim regarding Snider’s first home run to right field is subject to some degree of interpretation. On July 15, 1958, he was widely reported to have homered to right-center field in the Coliseum. That homer seems to have gone into the record as being hit to center rather than right; Snider’s career home-run log on Baseball-Reference describes it as having been hit to deep center field. For a contemporary news account, see Associated Press, “Duke Snider First to Clear Coliseum Wall,” Barre (Vermont) Daily Times, July 16, 1958: 2.

8 “Reds, Dodgers Divide Doubleheader.”

9 Retrosheet describes it as a single to center field; the Cincinnati Enquirer described it as a bad-hop single over shortstop.

10 “Reds, Dodgers Divide Doubleheader.”

11 “Reds, Dodgers Divide Doubleheader”; Si Burick, “Newk to Rescue of Angry Reds,” Dayton Daily News, May 21, 1959: 22.

12 Si Burick, “Temple Fined, Rudolph Sent Out,” Dayton Daily News, May 24, 1959: 4, 3.

13 Newspapers of the day reported it was the 10th anniversary of Newcombe’s major-league debut, since officials, fans, writers, and players at the time did not consider the Negro Leagues to be major leagues. Newcombe played with the Newark Eagles in 1944 and 1945 before his debut with Brooklyn.

14 Bob Shafer, “Are Umpires Stagestruck?” Pasadena Independent, May 26, 1959: 15.

15 Secory worked at third base that day for the Reds’ 4-1 defeat of the Atlanta Braves in Cincinnati. According to Moses’ SABR biography and contemporary news accounts, Moses had planned to retire from baseball after the 1970 season but was persuaded by the Phillies to return as a roving hitting instructor.