The Baseball Journey of Jimmie Reese

August 28, 1988, Angels vs. Yankees, was Jimmie Reese Day at Anaheim Stadium.

Jimmie was then in his 17th year as the California Angels conditioning coach. He was 86 (born October 1, 1901), and still suiting up, still hitting fungoes the way a carpenter drives nails. He could “pitch” batting practice with his split fungo bat, work pitchers with sharp grounders until their tongues hung out, short-hop infielders black and blue. He once hit a flagpole on a bet at a distance of more than 200 feet.

On this sunny Sunday afternoon. a crowd of 40,000 watched while a short film of his fungo work played on the big outfield screen. They saw video messages of congratulations from Sparky Anderson in Detroit and Nolan Ryan in Houston.

Then they watched a brief ceremony behind home plate in which Jimmie was given a lifetime contract and a rocking chair, and they heard the usual things about his long baseball career. He had been a bat boy with the L.A. Angels of the Pacific Coast League back in 1917, he had been Babe Ruth’s roommate on the Yankees, and had become such great friends with Rvan that one of the pitcher’s sons had been named Reese.

In fact, a proper appreciation of Jimmie Reese only began there. In Jimmie, baseball’s living memory reached back to dead ball days. He had worked out with players who had begun their major league careers in the 1890s, had trod the field with the immortal Frank Chance and Wahoo Sam Crawford. He recalled sharing the Babe’s boulevard nights, helping Lou Gehrig out of a slump, and watching Ted Williams as a skinny minor leaguer endlessly checking his swing in a clubhouse mirror. He recalled Grover Cleveland Alexander’s control and Dizzy Dean’s dusters. He remembered crowds gathering for batting practice displays of Reggie Jackson, just as they had for the Babe a half-century earlier.

And he could recall the first time his team had honored him with a day; in August, 1927. That day, the congratulatory messages were telegrams from Bob Meusel and Tony Lazzeri of the vaunted 1927 Yankees, and Harry Heilmann, who would hit .398 for Detroit that year. They were honoring Jimmie as the star second baseman of the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. He was the toast of the Coast, regarded as perhaps the best-fielding second baseman in the game, East or West, and big league teams were begging to trade for him.

Jimmie Reese was born in New York but came to Los Angeles as a small boy with his mother and sister. The record lists his name variously, the last name usually Solomon, but from the time he was a schoolboy he was simply known as Jimmie Reese, the name apparently coming from a family friend and mentor. As a youth, Jimmie got a job as a newsboy, hawking papers on street corners. He already had three of the tools that would make him a success for the rest of his life — a dazzling smile, a winning personality, and great hustle — and he became a sort of urban Huck Finn. He was still a boy when his newspaper manager gave him the lucrative territory of the U.S. Navy submarine base at San Pedro. Jimmie was soon living on the base, sending money home to mom, wearing dress blues, and hanging out with the base’s ball team when he wasn’t attending San Pedro High.

From this point on, Jimmie Reese spent the rest of his life in the company of big-leaguers. Lefty O’Doul, Fred Haney, Bob Meusel, Harry Heilmann, and Howard Ehmke were among those who played service ball there during the teens.

Inevitably, in that crowd, he was soon part of the scene around L.A.’s Washington Park, home of the PCL Angels. By 1917 he had hustled his way into the batboy’s job. Frank Chance, the manager, paid him every Sunday with a dollar and a baseball.

The seasons rolled over and by the early 1920s the batboy had played school and semi-pro ball. His slick fielding had won him a nickname, “Pelican,” and he was chafing for a chance in the Coast League. Jimmie remembered a conversation with Red Killefer, by then the Angels manager, who had taken him under his wing.

“I told him one time I wanted to be a ballplayer and he said, ‘Well, Jimmie, I love you like a son, but,’ he says, ‘there’s only one thing you can do. You’re a good fielder. But you can’t run, you can’t hit, you’ve got a bad arm.’ I wanted to be a shortstop, and you had to be a good arm to play shortstop. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll play second base.’ He said, ‘Well, you still need a great deal. It’s hard to figure that you’ll ever play better than Class A ball.”

“Yeah, he told me. You know, he meant it as a father would to a son. I says, ‘Well, I’m gonna make it anyway.’ I didn’t know anything. That was my life.”

So he kept playing, wherever he could. He went to spring training with the San Francisco Seals in 1924 but was cut. He went off to Eureka, tore up the Northern California bush league and was picked up by the Seals’ cross-Bay rivals, the Oaks, that same year. A week after joining the team they were playing a series in Seattle. The manager there was none other than Red Killefer. On Wednesday night, Jimmie went home with him and enjoyed Mrs. Killefer’s home cooking. The next afternoon, with the game on the line and the bases loaded, Killefer ordered an intentional walk to get at Jimmie. Jimmie doubled to left to win the game.

From the start, Jimmie played with panache. He played headlong, diving, leave-your-feet baseball, and he quickly became a fan favorite. Writers loved him, too, because he was Horatio Alger in spikes — the former batboy who made himself a player by hard work and hustle, Lyn Lary, just 19, had taken over shortstop for the Oaks, and he and Jimmie quickly forged a dashing, acrobatic double-play partnership that would flourish for four years. As Jimmie matured through 1925 and 1926, the veteran baseball men around the league began comparing him to the best fielders they’d ever seen, and the headiest, players like Johnny Evers and Eddie Collins.

In 1927, the Oaks won the PCL championship. Playing in 191 games, Jimmie hit .295. He set a fielding record, handling 1,294 chances with just 21 errors, for a fielding percentage of .984, far better than any second baseman in the majors. The White Sox, Reds, Dodgers, Pirates, Cubs and A’s were all mentioned as bidding for his services, and he might have had a long big league career with some of them. As it was, the Oaks wanted to sell him and sidekick Lyn Lary together, and the price was high. In December 1927, it was announced they had been sold for $150,000 — to the New York Yankees.

The Yankees already had two young Californians, Mark Koenig and Tony Lazzeri, at short and second. When baseball writers asked the Yankees’ free-spending owner, Col. Jacob Ruppert, what he wanted with two more, he replied, “They tell me that Lary and Reese are so good that I am buying them so they cannot play against me.” He could afford to keep them on the shelf in case he needed them, and that’s what he did. Jimmie didn’t join the team until the spring of 1930.

Yankee manager Miller Huggins, who had loomed as a patron, had died at the end of 1929. The team was unsettled in 1930, eclipsed by the great Philadelphia A’s, and in 1931 Joe McCarthy took over, determined to make changes. Jimmie wound up in St. Paul. In 1932 he played for the St. Louis Cardinals, but they were in transition, too. He hit .265 for them and registered the highest fielding percentage of all National League second basemen. But Jimmie was back on the Coast by February of ’33, this time for good. In later years, Jimmie liked to say it was Uncle Charlie that got him — pitiless big-league curve balls — and that the fates put him behind two great second basemen in Tony Lazzeri and Frankie Frisch. He did not say it bitterly, and his numbers do not reflect failure. In any case, his stay in The Show was all too brief — three seasons in which he hit respectably and fielded with his usual elan.

Jimmie came home to the L.A. Angels in 1933. and he picked up where he left off. He again held center stage as the acrobatic star, and in these years, if you were on the Coast, it was great to be young and an Angel. Jimmie had fans in Hollywood — Groucho Marx, William Powell (“The Thin Man”) — and the team was one of the great minor league clubs of all time. In ’33 they played .600 ball, won 114 games, and finished first. In ’34, they took both halves of a hastily split season with 137 wins, and trounced a PCL all-star team four games out of six. Jimmie hit .330 and .311 those years, and was his usual self in the field. After that, his offensive numbers began to decline. In the late ’30s he wound up with San Diego where he enjoyed a last hurrah as a player, winning another PCL pennant in ’37.

For most of the next three decades, Jimmie was a fixture in the league, a familiar coaching figure under a dozen managers in Seattle, Hawaii, Portland, and San Diego. He had a whole career, 1948-62, coaching for the Padres. “Then,” Jimmie recalled, “Fred Haney called me in one day and says, ‘Would you like to go back to the major leagues?” I says, “I’ve been waiting for years.” “Well, you got it. You’ll be a coach next year.” And from that spring of 1972 until his death in 1994, he was a coach for the Angels. He went to his grave in his uniform, No. 50.

Through all the years, Jimmie Reese was faithful to the game, grateful for his opportunity, and a believer in the idea that there was an obligation to hustle, practice hard, play hard all the time. Probably few of the players he worked on with his relentless fungoes understood that he wasn’t asking anything of them that he wouldn’t have given himself. Nolan Ryan was one who did; Gary Pettis, the Angels’ fleet center fielder, was another. At Jimmie’s funeral, Pettis told a story of how one day he was in center when an opposing batter homered far over his head, a towering shot. Pettis drifted back on it to watch it go out. When the inning ended, he found a place on the bench next to Jimmie, and Jimmie asked him, “What happened on that fly?” Pettis, taken aback, replied that the ball had gone 10 rows deep into the stands. “Come out early tomorrow,” Jimmie responded, “and we’ll work on it.”

Jimmie Reese had a wonderful baseball life. but it would be hard to say who got the better of the deal, Jimmie or the game he loved.