Spencer Harris: A Decade of Minor-League Greatness in Minneapolis

Forty years ago, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) took a step to provide long overdue recognition for the top players in minor-league baseball history. SABR surveyed its members in 1983 to select the top 10 minor leaguers of all time. The next year, a review committee revised the plan by expanding the list to include five more players. The final list of 15 players was published in SABR’s Minor League Stars, Volume II in 1985. The list included six players who played for the Minneapolis Millers: Buzz Arlett, Nick Cullop, Spencer Harris, Joe Hauser, Frank Shellenback and Perry Werden.

Werden was with the Millers for six seasons between 1894 and 1902 while Shellenback pitched for them in 1918 and 1919. Cullop had stints in Minneapolis in 1920 and 1930; Arlett was a Miller from 1934–36; Hauser from 1932–36; and Harris from 1928– 37. Cullop and Harris were Millers teammates in 1930, while Arlett, Harris, and Hauser were teammates between 1934 and 1936.

While each of the six had extraordinary careers, that of the 5-foot-9, 145-pound Harris is arguably the most noteworthy in minor-league history. Harris spent 10 of his 28 professional seasons with the Millers, and when he returned to Minneapolis in 1957 for an oldtimers event, Minneapolis sportswriter Halsey Hall wrote that he was “one of the most graceful of all Miller stars over a 60-year period and easily in the first eight of all-time fandom favorites.” Harris told Hall, there were “no thrills better than my days at Nicollet.”1

The left-handed hitting Harris stands as the all-time leader in minor-league history in games played (3,258), runs (2,287), hits (3,617), doubles (743), extra-base hits (1,151), and total bases (5,434). He is also fourth on the minor-league career RBI list with 1,769. Cullop (1,857) and Arlett (1,786) are the top two on the list. Jim Poole, who played for the Millers in 1927, is third with 1,785. (Note that Cullop and Poole’s totals are incomplete.)

Including the 94 hits he had in 164 major-league games, Harris finished with 3,711 hits in his professional career. Only 11 players collected more hits in their professional career than Harris: Pete Rose, Ichiro Suzuki (including his totals from Japan), Ty Cobb, Hank Aaron, Jigger Statz, Derek Jeter, Stan Musial, Tris Speaker, Paul Waner, Carl Yastrzemski, and Wade Boggs.

MINNESOTA NATIVE

Harris was born Anthony Spencer Harris in Duluth, Minnesota, on August 12, 1900. His family lived in Milwaukee while he was in grade school, then moved to Seattle, where he was a standout in baseball and basketball for Broadway High School.

As a high school senior in 1921, Harris batted .429.2 Four days after graduation, he made his professional debut for the Tacoma Tigers of the Pacific International League. In the second game of a home doubleheader against Vancouver on June 19, Harris drew a walk in his first professional plate appearance and went 0-for-3 while leading off and playing center field in the Tigers’ 4–2 victory. Two days later, still at home against Vancouver, he got his first professional hit—a solo home run in the eighth inning of Tacoma’s loss.

Harris was a fixture in the Tigers lineup for the rest of the season. He batted .271 in 71 games as Tacoma finished with a 63–53 record, good for second place in the four-team league. After the season, his contract was purchased by the Philadelphia Athletics.

In 1922, he played for Bay City in the Class B Michigan-Ontario League. He batted .340 in 121 games to earn a promotion to the A’s in September. But he suffered a sprained ankle and did not appear in any games.

He began the 1923 season with Shreveport of the Class A Texas League. After hitting .243 in 12 games, he was sent back to Bay City. Over the rest of the season, he batted .284 in 125 games as the Wolves won the league title with an 80–51 record.

Harris returned to Bay City in 1924 and was instrumental in the Wolves winning another league title. He batted .319 with seven home runs, 68 RBIs and 35 stolen bases, leading the Wolves to an 86–50 record.

After the season, his contract was purchased by the Chicago White Sox and he spent the 1925 and 1926 seasons with them. In 1925, he batted .283 in 56 games. He followed that up with a .252 average in 80 games in 1926. The White Sox returned Harris to the minors in 1927, where he enjoyed an outstanding season for Shreveport, batting .354 with 201 hits, 12 home runs and 89 RBIs. He led the Texas League with 60 doubles.

 

 

JOINS THE MILLERS

In January 1928, Harris’s rights were purchased by the Minneapolis Millers for $10,000. Charles Johnson wrote in the Minneapolis Star that Harris was “a colorful young player” who had “impressed everyone with his speed on the bases and in the outfield. He bats left-handed and is a good socker, according to averages and reports.”3

Except for two brief stints—six games with the Washington Nationals in 1929 and 22 with the Athletics in 1930—Harris was a mainstay in the Millers lineup for the next 10 seasons. He was an immediate hit in his debut season in Minneapolis, batting .327 with 219 hits and 127 RBIs while leading the American Association in runs scored (133), doubles (41), and home runs (32).

In the five seasons from 1929 to 1933, Harris batted .340, .363, .347, .352, and .355 for the Millers. In 1932, the Millers won 100 games to capture the AA title. They fell to the International League champion Newark Bears in the Junior World Series.

In 1937, his 10th and final season with the Millers, he batted .326. A week after the end of the season, a group of major-league players played an exhibition game against a team comprising Millers and St. Paul Saints players at Nicollet Park, home of the Millers.

Future Hall of Famer Bob Feller, who had gone 9–7 with a 3.39 ERA and 150 strikeouts in 148⅔ innings for Cleveland that year as an 18-year old, pitched two innings for the major-leaguers. He faced 10 hitters, walking three, striking out three, and allowing just one hit, a game-tying triple by Harris in the third inning. The major-leaguers went on to win, 7–5.

In December 1937, at the American and National Leagues’ annual winter meetings, the Boston Red Sox announced they had acquired outfielder Ted Williams from the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League in exchange for two players and cash. Three players were sent by Boston to San Diego in the deal for the 19-year-old future Hall of Famer; Harris was the player named two days later. The Millers had become a Red Sox farm team in 1936. Williams would spend just one season with the Millers. He won the American Association Triple Crown with a .366 batting average, 43 home runs and 142 RBIs.

During his 10 seasons with the Millers, Harris logged at least 200 hits four times, and just missed the mark in 1934, with 198. He had 100 or more RBIs six times and averaged 16.6 home runs and 32 doubles per season.

While Harris was with the Millers, they averaged 88 victories and won at least 85 games seven times. They suffered only one losing season (80–88 in 1931) during his tenure. From 1932 to 1935 they won the American Association Western Division each year, and they won the league title in 1932 and 1935.

Donie Bush, who managed both Harris and Williams during their time with the Millers, told a Minneapolis columnist, “Harris was a fine natural hitter. Like Williams, he was gifted with keen eyes and uncanny judgement. A pitcher had to throw Harris strikes in order to get him to offer at the ball. He hit lefthanders and right-handers alike, and he hit to all fields. Spencer had perfect rhythm and timing. He was a great ball hawk and very fast. Had a weak throwing arm, but offset that with everything else he did well. I’ll tell you something else about Harris—he was one of the cutest guys, when on second base, at stealing signs and calling the turn on what the pitcher would throw of any fellow I ever knew, including Cobb.”4

Bush, who was a teammate of Cobb’s on the Detroit Tigers for 14 seasons, added, “Too bad Spencer lacked confidence in himself when with Washington and the Athletics. If he had Williams’ cockiness, he would have stayed in the majors a long time.”5

PACIFIC COAST LEAGUE

Harris spent the next eight seasons in the Pacific Coast League. In 1938, he batted .301 with seven home runs and 92 RBIs for San Diego. He played for the Hollywood Stars in 1939 and the Seattle Rainiers in 1940. Over the next three seasons, Harris helped the Rainiers win three consecutive PCL titles.

The Rainiers won 112 games in 1940 and 104 in 1941. Harris, who turned 41 in August 1941, batted .302 in 133 games for the Rainiers that season. He entered the season with 2,981 career hits in professional baseball, 2,887 of which he’d racked up as a minor leaguer. He surpassed 3,000 hits early in the season and 3,000 hits in the minors in September.

In 1942, the Rainiers finished third with a 96–82 record before defeating Sacramento, 4–1 in the first round of the PCL playoffs. They went on to beat the Los Angeles Angels in six games for the title. In 1943, Harris joined the Portland Beavers, where he remained until returning to Hollywood during the 1945 season.

Beginning in 1946, he spent the next two and a half seasons with Yakima (Washington) of the Class B Western International League, serving as player-manager in 1946. In the final month of the 1948 season, he was a player-manager for Marysville (California) of the Class D Far West League.

After managing the Cleveland Indians’ North Platte farm team in the Class D Nebraska State League in 1956, Harris moved back to Minneapolis and went to work as a salesman at a downtown clothing store. During his nearly three-decade minor-league career, he batted over .300 in 18 seasons and finished with a career average of .318. He had more than 200 hits in a season five times—his career-high was 224 with the Millers in 1933—and drove in more than 100 runs six times.

 

 

LIFE AFTER PLAYING BASEBALL

In August 1950, Harris was asked by the Seattle Times how he continued to have success as a hitter past the age of 40. He replied, “Eyes and wrists. As long as they don’t go…I’ll be able to hit the ball when I’m 60 years old.”6 In November 1957, his wife, Olivia, whom he married in 1935 while he was playing for the Millers, died from complications of pneumonia at the age of 45. In August 1959—two weeks past his 59th birthday— Harris played in an old-timers game at Metropolitan Stadium. In his only at-bat, he doubled to center.

Gene Mauch, the manager of the Minneapolis Millers at the time, marveled at Harris’s hitting ability. He told Halsey Hall that he was struck by “the beautiful ease with which Spencer Harris got his double.”7 In an interview in 1978, Harris was asked about his highest salary as a player. “Made $7,500 with the Athletics, but that didn’t last long,” Harris recalled. “I was making $800 per month with the Millers, but that was cut to $400 during the Depression. In those days a ballplayer couldn’t get a job in the winter because a guy figured he’d just get you trained in and off you’d be to spring training.”8

Harris recalled one failure during his time with the Millers. In October 1933, he and three of his teammates—Andy Cohen, Walter Tauscher, and Wes Griffin—opened a restaurant/club in downtown Minneapolis called The Wind-up. “We turned people away,” Harris recalled, “but we still lost money. We were just ballplayers. Playing ball was what I was good at.”9

In the 1960s, Harris scouted briefly for the New York Mets. He stayed active golfing and playing in a slow-pitch softball league into his 60s. In 1976, he suffered a heart attack. After his recovery, he resumed golfing regularly at Hiawatha Golf Course in south Minneapolis.

Spencer Harris died on July 3, 1982, at the age of 81.Two days later, a Minneapolis columnist wrote that longtime Minneapolis sportswriters “Halsey Hall and Dick Cullum counted Harris among the best players they ever saw. And Bob Nordstrom, the pro at Hiawatha and the man to whom Harris entrusted his scrapbook, is of a generation who were told by their fathers that Spence Harris was one of the great ones.”10

JOEL RIPPEL, a Minnesota native and graduate of the University of Minnesota, is the author or co-author of 13 books on Minnesota sports history. His most recent book, Hidden History of Twin Cities Sports, was published in 2023 by Arcadia Publishing. He has also contributed as a writer or editor to 26 books published by SABR.

 

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also consulted Baseball Reference, Retrosheet, Newspapers.com, and Stewthornley.net.

American Association Record Book, 1977.

Johnson, Lloyd, ed. The Minor League Register, 1st ed. Durham, NC:

Baseball America, 1994.

Johnson, Lloyd and Miles Wolff, eds. The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, 3rd ed. Durham, NC: Baseball America, 2007.

Rippel, Joel. The Hidden History of Twin Cities Sports. Charleston, SC:

History Press, 2023.

Thornley, Stew. On to Nicollet: The Glory and Fame of the Minneapolis Millers.

Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1988.

 

Notes

1 Halsey Hall, “Spencer Harris, Old Favorite, Back Home,” Minneapolis Star, August 29, 1957, 39.

2 “Interscholastic League Top 25 Hitters,” Seattle Union Record, June 3, 1921, 29. He went 18 for 42.

3 Charles Johnson, “Gus Mancuso Will Assist Eddie Kenna,” Minneapolis Star, January 21, 1928, 18.

4 George Barton, Sportographs, Minneapolis Tribune, December 4, 1942, 11.

5 Barton.

6 Joe Miller, “They Never Say Die,” Seattle Times, August 20, 1950, 61.

7 Halsey Hall, “Everyone Wants Repeat of Old-timers Ball Game,” Minneapolis Star, August 25, 1959, 37.

8 Joe Soucheray, Minneapolis Tribune, July 12, 1978, 30.

9 Soucheray, Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 5, 1982, 27.

10 Soucheray.