A Dozen Cape Cod League Managers First Honed Skills in Major League Baseball

Hyannis general manager John Green with coach Bob Schaefer, former manager of the Kansas City Royals in 2005, was the skipper for both Bourne 1971-72 and Hyannis in 1978-79. (Courtesy of the Barnstable Patriot)

 

When Jarrod Saltalamacchia was named manager of the Falmouth Commodores and Dennis Cook became the manager of the Chatham Anglers for the 2025 season, they became the 11th and 12th former major leaguers – and the first in more than 35 years – to head up a Cape Cod Baseball League team.

Here is a look back at all former major leaguers who managed Cape Cod Baseball League teams over the years.

Wally Snell (Hyannis 1923) – Boston AL 1913.

Snell led Hyannis to the first Cape League championship in 1923.

Fun Fact: In six major-league games with the Red Sox, he hit .250, scoring one run and stealing one base.

Chippie Gaw (Falmouth 1926) – Chicago NL 1920.

He pitched and was a player-manager, guiding Falmouth to a 22-19 record.

Fun Fact: In six games on the mound with the Cubs, he posted a 1-1 record over 13 innings.

Freddie Moncewicz (Hyannis 1926-27) – Boston AL 1928.

After leading Hyannis to the championship in 1927 as a player-manager, he later played with Bourne (1934-35).

Fun Fact: In his only three games with the Red Sox, in 1928, he struck out in his only at-bat.

Danny Silva (Wareham 1927, Osterville 1930, Barnstable 1931-32) – Washington AL 1919.

After his career as a player-manager on the Cape, he became a longtime league official and umpire and was among the inaugural inductees in the Cape Cod Baseball League Hall of Fame in 2000.

Fun Fact: He played only one game with the 1919 Senators and had one hit in four at-bats, a single that came as part of Washington’s three-run ninth-inning rally. The Senators lost the game, 7-4, to the Chicago White Sox and Shoeless Joe Jackson, a team that would become notorious for the Black Sox Scandal that marred that season’s World Series.

Patsy Donovan (Orleans 1929-30) – He played with eight different teams dating back to the Boston Beaneaters (1890) through the Brooklyn Superbas (1906-07). Other teams were Brooklyn Bridegrooms (1890), Louisville Colonels (1891), Washington Statesmen/Senators (1891-92; 1904), Pittsburgh Pirates (1892-99), and St. Louis Cardinals (1900-03). Through many of those years, he was a player-manager with Pittsburgh (1897, ’99), St. Louis (1901-03), Washington (1904), Brooklyn (1906-08 and the Boston Red Sox in 1911). He posted an overall record of 47-41 in two years with Orleans.

Fun Fact: He batted .301 lifetime and set a major-league record for career games in right field as well as retiring among the career leaders in total games (1,813), assists (264), and double plays (69) as an outfielder.

Rusty Yarnall (Orleans 1937) – Philadelphia NL 1926.

He later became the longtime coach of baseball, football, and basketball at the Lowell Textile Institute. In his one season managing on the Cape, his Orleans team finished in the cellar with a 10-37 record.

Fun Fact: In his one major-league game with the Phillies, he pitched a scoreless inning against the Brooklyn Robins. When he walked the first two batters in the next inning, he was lifted and went on to take the loss.

Wilfred “Lefty” LeFebvre (Dennis 1959-60, Chatham ’64) – Boston AL 1938-39, Washington AL 43-44.

With Chatham he finished first with a 27-6 record in 1964 before losing to Cotuit in the finals. He appeared in 36 major-league games, posting a 5-5 record with a 5.03 ERA and three saves.

Fun Fact: In his first major-league at-bat, he hit a ball over Fenway Park’s Green Monster for what proved to be his only career home run.

Bob Schaefer (Bourne 1971-72, Hyannis ’78-79) – manager for the KC Royals 1991 and 2005.

Schaefer posted a 64-18-1 record in two seasons with the Hyannis Mets, leading them to back-to-back championships in 1978-79.

Fun Fact: In 1965, Schaefer played in the Cape League for the Sagamore Clouters, helping the team to the league title under manager Lou Lamoriello, the longtime hockey coach and general manager of the New Jersey Devils and GM of the New York Islanders.

Al Worthington (Falmouth 1980) – pitched for five major-league teams including the New York/San Francisco Giants (1953-54; ’56-59), Boston Red Sox (1960), Chicago White Sox (1960), Cincinnati Reds (1963-64), and Minnesota Twins (1964-69).

He led Falmouth to the 1980 Cape Cod Baseball League championship, 3 games to 2 over Chatham, the last championship won by the Commodores.

Fun Fact: Red Sox fans may recall that he uncorked a pair of wild pitches in relief of Dean Chance for the Twins, allowing the 1967 Red Sox to score a pair of sixth-inning runs on the last day of the season. Boston went on to capture the pennant that day thanks to the five-run sixth inning.

Pete Varney (Cotuit 1988-89) – Chicago AL ’73-76, Atlanta ’76.

In his two years at Cotuit, the Kettleers had third-place finishes and did not make the playoffs.

Fun Fact: A college football player, he caught the game-tying conversion pass from Harvard QB Frank Champi in the 1968 version of “The Game” between Harvard and Yale.1 Varney’s clutch catch gave the Crimson a 29-29 tie and a share of the Ivy League championship. The furious comeback inspired the Harvard Crimson to use as its headline for the game story, “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29.”

Dennis Cook (Chatham 2025) – San Francisco 1988-89, Philadelphia ’89-90, ’01, Los Angeles NL ‘90-91, Cleveland ’92-93, ’95, Chicago AL ’94, Texas ’95-96, Florida ’97, New York NL ’98-01, Anaheim 2002.

Fun Fact: Even though he was a pitcher, Cook was also a good hitter and is number two among the major-leagues’ best hitting pitchers between 1973 and 2003 (with 100 or more at-bats). His batting average was .264 (29-for-110) with two home runs.

Fun Fact: One of Saltalamacchia’s defining moments of the 2013 postseason with the Red Sox was his walk-off single in the ninth inning of Game Two of the American League Championship Series against Detroit, scoring Jonny Gomes with the winning run. It was the game that David Ortiz tied with an eighth-inning grand slam.

MIKE RICHARD has been the historian of the Cape Cod Baseball League since 2018. He spent 35 years in public education, both as an English teacher and later a guidance counselor before retiring from Gardner (Massachusetts) High School in 2013. A longtime columnist for the Gardner News, he also wrote sports columns for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the Barnstable Patriot, and the Cape Cod Times. He has authored two sports history books: Glory to Gardner: 100 Years of Football in the Chair City, and Super Saturdays: The Complete History of the Massachusetts High School Super Bowl, as well as contributions to many SABR publications. Also known for his exhaustive research of Massachusetts high-school sports history, he is historian of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association and is responsible for all records and statistics for the annual state tournament programs. He and his wife, Peggy, live in Sandwich on Cape Cod and are the parents of two grown children, Casey and Lindsey, and two grandchildren, Theo and Grace.

 

SOURCES

For more information on Dennis Cook, see his SABR biography by Alan Cohen at https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Dennis-Cook/ .

Most of the other Cape League managers mentioned here also have SABR biographies.

 

NOTES

1 In 1959, sports columnist Red Smith popularized the phrase “The Game” many decades after it was coined in 1898 by Harvard team captain A.F. Holden in a letter to coach William Cameron Forbes. It was billed as “The Game” a year later and has been referred to affectionately as such ever since. See Alexander Medel and Hudson War, “Triumphs and Trickery: Tracing the History of the Yale-Harvard Rivalry,” Yale Daily News, November 17, 2023.