September 5, 1951: Two paying fans watch minor league pitchers’ duel between Grand Rapids, Flint

It was probably no great surprise when the city of Flint, Michigan, dropped out of affiliated professional baseball after the 1951 season. The Flint Arrows of the Class A Central League finished the season 60 games under .500 and drew just 25,900 fans across 68 home games, or about 381 fans per game – about half the league average.1 The money-losing Central League went under in February 1952, as well.2

One home game near the end of the Arrows’ final season brought the team’s struggles into sharp focus. According to the Flint Journal newspaper, the Arrows drew only two paying fans for their September 5, 1951, home game against the Grand Rapids Jets. News stories indicated that 23 additional spectators got in for free, though the stories didn’t explain how reporters distinguished one group from the other.3

Roughly 163,120 residents of Flint missed a taut pitchers’ duel between Bob Harrison of the Arrows and Ed Kowalski of the Jets.4 The home team mustered only four hits, the visitors three. The game’s only run was scored in the top of the first, and Kowalski made it stand up the rest of the way for a 1-0 Jets victory.

The 1951 season had not been kind to fans in either city. At the start of play on September 5, the Jets and Arrows held down the bottom two spots in the six-team Central League. Grand Rapids’ 51-81 record put the Jets 34½ games behind first-place Dayton with three left to play, while Flint’s 35-97 record put the Arrows 50½ games out of first with four games remaining.5 Loop President T.J. Halligan announced that morning that the league would not play its planned four-team, Shaughnessy-style postseason playoff. The news made no difference to Grand Rapids or Flint, the two cities that would have been left out.6

Grand Rapids, a Chicago Cubs affiliate, drew even more poorly than Flint did over the course of the season, attracting just 21,230 fans, or about 317 per game.7 One of the Jets’ players, Andy Varga, had pitched for the Cubs in 1950 and was headed back at the end of the 1951 season,8 while teammates Cal Howe and George Piktuzis had short stints with the big club in future years. (None of the three appeared in the September 5 game.)

Starting pitcher Kowalski was a 28-year-old right-hander from Saginaw in the final season of an eight-year minor-league career that was interrupted for World War II service.9 Over the full season, he went 13-14 with a 5.32 ERA in 30 games, getting touched up for 266 hits in 208 innings.

Flint had affiliated with the Detroit Tigers in 1950, but the parent club broke off the connection due to financial losses, and the Arrows operated in 1951 as an independent team under local ownership.10 Arrows pitchers Harrison and Mel Held went on to short major-league careers with the Baltimore Orioles, while infielder John Sanderson and catcher Percy Howard had played in the Negro American League. Sanderson, Howard, and Held did not play against Grand Rapids.

As of September 5, Harrison was a few weeks shy of 21. The righty from St. Louis posted a 9-15 record in 30 Central League games in 1951 – three with first-place Dayton, 27 with last-place Flint. Harrison, as Kowalski had done before him, was about to leave pro baseball for military service. He returned to the pros in 1954 after two years of Korean War duty.11

Unfortunately, the Flint Journal made no apparent attempt to interview the pair of fans who paid to enter the ballpark, and the paper’s game story provides no explanation for the low turnout. Archived weather data indicates that September 5, 1951, was rain-free in Flint, with an unseasonably warm high of 76 degrees.12 There seemed little climatological reason for Flint fans to stay away from 16,000-seat Atwood Stadium in such overwhelming numbers.13

The September 5 game was a 4:30 P.M. start on a Wednesday, which might have been an inconvenient time for fans.14 Flint’s baseball lovers might simply have been tired of losing, too. Only 38 of them had paid to see the Arrows and Jets do battle the day before.15

One potential explanation can be ruled out: The Tigers played a night game in Cleveland on September 5, so the Arrows – located about an hour away from Detroit – were not competing with Michigan’s big-league team.

In the top of the first, Harrison retired leadoff hitter Ted Sterger, then surrendered a double to left field by second baseman Bill Ley.16 Harrison got third baseman Jim Babcock to pop out, then gave up a second double, also to left field, by center fielder Ed Kosan. Ley scored on Kosan’s hit, giving Grand Rapids a 1-0 lead. Ley and Kosan were two of the Jets’ more consistent offensive producers in 1951. By coincidence, both men hit .286 for the season – Ley in 104 games, Kosan in 55.

Grand Rapids manager and first baseman Everett Robinson, in the latter years of a 19-season minor-league career, also doubled with one out in the second inning. After that, Harrison held the Jets without a hit for the remaining 7 2/3 innings. The Jets mustered a few additional baserunners – Harrison walked two and threw a wild pitch, and the Arrows committed two errors17 – but game stories do not suggest that any of those situations developed into a serious threat.

On offense, Harrison hit two singles of his own – one for each paying customer, and more hits than any other batter in the game.

But Flint was unable to turn two promising rallies into runs. In the third inning, first baseman Joe Bernard reached on an error.18 One out later, Harrison singled, and one out after that, second baseman Jim Fishback drew a walk to load the bases. Shortstop Jeff Labda grounded into a force play at second to end the threat.

The other rally developed in Flint’s last turn at bat in the ninth. Left fielder Joe Scalise, Flint’s top hitter with a .331 season average, drew a leadoff walk – the third and last issued by Kowalski. After pinch-hitter Dick Loomis struck out, third baseman Charlie Moore singled for Flint’s fourth and final hit. Kowalski bore down, getting Bernard to fly out to center. Catcher Tony Mlynarek, one of two brothers in Flint’s lineup, grounded out to end the game in 1 hour and 28 minutes.19

Incidentally, the umpires who lucked into one of the quietest and most placid working environments in minor-league history were Tony Sitter and Harry Lindsay. Neither man umpired in the majors.20

The season ended with Grand Rapids at 53-82, 33 games out of first, and Flint at 38-98, 48½ games back. Both cities were reportedly interested in returning to the league in 1952 despite financial losses, but Halligan announced a planned “one-year suspension” of the Central League in February 1952.21

The league never returned, and as of the start of the 2025 season, Flint has not hosted an affiliated professional team since. Grand Rapids, which hosted a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League from 1945 to 1954, did not participate in affiliated minor-league baseball again until 1994, when the West Michigan Whitecaps of the Class A Midwest League came to town.

After baseball, Kowalski went home to Saginaw and worked for 35 years in General Motors’ foundry there, also coaching amateur baseball. He died at age 88 in 2012.22 After appearing in one game apiece for the Orioles in 1955 and 1956, Harrison went into the insurance industry, rising to become the chairman and president of Indiana Lumbermens Mutual Insurance Co. Harrison died at age 92 in 2023.23

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Gary Belleville 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 minor-league games, but the September 6, 1951, editions of the Flint (Michigan) Journal and Grand Rapids (Michigan) Press published box scores.

Image of 1979 TCMA The ’50s card #76 (Bob Harrison) downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 By comparison, the Charleston (West Virginia) Senators drew more than 102,000 fans to lead the league, according to Baseball-Reference’s page on the 1951 Central League, accessed in March 2025, https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/league.cgi?id=2d76b834.

2 Associated Press, “Central League Gives Up,” Grand Rapids (Michigan) Press, February 6, 1952: 48.

3 Len Hoyes, “Arrows Lose Again by 1-0; Fans Get In Free Tonight,” Flint (Michigan) Journal, September 6, 1951: 50; United Press, “A Gate Record,” Grand Rapids Press, September 6, 1951: 31.

4 The 1950 US Census cited Flint’s population as 163,143. “1950 United States Census of Population: Flint, Michigan Census Tracts,” Bulletin P-D20, US Department of Commerce: 7, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924052151127&seq=235. Accessed May 2025.

5 “Central League” (standings), Grand Rapids Press, September 5, 1951: 33.

6 Hoyes, “Arrows Lose Again by 1-0; Fans Get In Free Tonight.” The league’s other four teams were in Dayton, Ohio; Charleston, West Virginia; and Muskegon and Saginaw, Michigan.

7 Jerry LeDonne, “Owners Table Youngstown, Evansville’s Entry Bids,” Grand Rapids Press, February 2, 1951: 29.

8 Varga pitched in two games for the 1951 Cubs, on September 19 and in the first game of a doubleheader on September 23.

9 Kowalski had pitched in the lowest levels of the minors in 1941 and 1942, then disappeared from the pros until 1946. According to his obituary, he served in the US Army Air Force during World War II. “Kowalski, Edwin C.,” Saginaw (Michigan) News, July 19, 2012: A5.

10 LeDonne, “Owners Table Youngstown, Evansville’s Entry Bids.”

11 “Robert Lee Harrison” (obituary), Indianapolis Star, January 22, 2023: A26.

12 Historical weather data retrieved from Weather Underground in March 2025, https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/KFNT/date/1951-9-5.

13 United Press, “A Gate Record.”

14 “Arrows Lose, Play Afternoon Contest Today,” Flint Journal, September 5, 1951: 8.

15 United Press, “A Gate Record.”

16 All game action in this story is taken from Hoyes, “Arrows Lose Again by 1-0; Fans Get In Free Tonight,” and “Jets’ Single Run Beats Flint Again,” Grand Rapids Press, September 6, 1951: 30, as well as box scores printed in both newspapers.

17 The Arrows’ errors were committed by Harrison and shortstop Jeff Labda. (As of March 2025, the latter player was listed in Baseball-Reference as Godfrey Labda, but the Flint Journal’s game story called him Jeff.)

18 Game stories do not detail the error. Two Grand Rapids players were charged with one error apiece – shortstop Ted Sterger and left fielder Jim Trew.

19 Tony’s younger brother Lawrence Mlynarek was Flint’s starting right fielder; Loomis pinch-hit for him in the ninth.

20 The Sporting News umpire cards for Tony Sitter (https://retrosheet.org/TSNUmpireCards/Sitter-Tony.jpg) and Harry Lindsay (https://retrosheet.org/TSNUmpireCards/Lindsay-Harry.jpg), accessed via Retrosheet in March 2025.

21 Associated Press, “Central League Gives Up.”

22 “Kowalski, Edwin C.”

23 “Robert Lee Harrison.”