The Long and Short of It: W.C. ‘Bill’ Thomas and Antonio ‘Little Tony’ Freitas

Bill Thomas. (Minor League Stars, SABR, 1978)

 

This is the story of two of the greatest pitchers in the history of the minor leagues. One was a lean righthander, 6 feet tall, 175 pounds, who pitched from 1926 to 1952 for 24 different teams in 24 seasons, but he never pitched in the major leagues. He did not pitch professionally in 3½ seasons during that stretch. (More on that later.) Let’s call this player “W.C.”

The other was a short fella, a lefty who stood, by his own account, a fraction below 5-feet-8 and weighed about 160 pounds. He pitched from 1928 through 1953 but only for 23 seasons within that span because he lost three seasons to military service. Let’s call him “Little Tony.” Little Tony did pitch in the major leagues in five of those 23 seasons (1932-1936). However, when he was invited to return to the big leagues two years after he left, he respectfully declined.

“W.C.” is William Clinton “Bill” Thomas. Thomas was born in East Prairie, Missouri, on January 9, 1905 (or 1907 or 1908); little else is known about Thomas’s life before or after Organized Baseball.1 What is known is that W.C. set minor-league records for games pitched (1,016), innings (5,995), wins (383), losses (347), hits (6,721), and runs (3,098).

To put some of these numbers in perspective, as of this writing, only 13 pitchers appeared in more than 1,016 major-league games. Five of them—Mariano Rivera, Dennis Eckersley, Hoyt Wilhelm, Trevor Hoffman, and Lee Smith—are in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The only major-league pitchers who pitched more than 5,995 innings are Cy Young and Pud Galvin; and Cy Young and Walter Johnson are the only pitchers who had more than 383 big-league wins. Those pitchers are also in Cooperstown.

“Little Tony” is Antonio “Tony” Freitas Jr. (pronounced FRAY-tis), born on May 5, 1908 (some records say 1910), in Mill Valley, California. His parents Antonio and Maria, immigrants from Portugal, met and married in Mill Valley in 1903. Freitas was an unassuming man and a fan favorite. He liked fishing and hunting, playing locker-room pranks and the accordion, and fast cars.

Although Freitas’s minor-league statistics are not quite as rarefied as Thomas’s, he ranks fourth on the list of all-time winningest minor-league pitchers, after three right-handers: Oyster Joe Martina (1910-1931) is second behind Thomas with 349 wins and George Washington Payne (1913-1940) is third with 348, followed by Freitas with 342.2 Martina had seven 20-win seasons; Freitas had nine (as did Charles “Spider” Baum), the best mark of all minor-league pitchers.3 For his achievements, Freitas was voted by SABR members in 1984 as the best minor-league pitcher of all time.4

Thomas got his break at the age of 21 in 1926, when he played for the Hanover (Pennsylvania) Raiders in the Blue Ridge League (Class D). He finished with 15 wins—tops on his team—and he led the league with 35 games and 246 innings pitched. In 1927 he pitched 244 innings and picked up 16 wins for the Charleroi (Pennsylvania) Babes in the Middle Atlantic League (Class C); he appeared in a league-best 41 games. Thomas averaged 42 games, 250 innings, and 16 wins in the 24 seasons he played.

Freitas got his start when he signed with the Sacramento Senators of the Pacific Coast League in 1928 at age 20. It was classified as a AA league (commonly called Double A), which in Freitas’s day was the highest minor-league classification. Many have called the PCL “a third major league.” After some seasoning in the Arizona State League, Freitas became a regular in the Senators’ rotation and led the team in wins in both 1930 and 1931 (19 wins each time).

Driving fast was Freitas’s only vice. He received a number of speeding tickets through the years and one landed him in Marin County (California) jail for five days. It happened in the summer of 1931. When Freitas was sentenced, he and Buddy Ryan, his manager, pleaded with and persuaded the judge to allow Freitas—with a deputy escort—to go to San Francisco to pitch his scheduled start against the Missions. Ryan knew scouts would be there to see Freitas. After winning the game, Freitas was returned to his cozy confines behind bars.

Freitas’s automobile-related risk-taking may have been a reason to dissuade major-league teams from purchasing his contract in those early years. Or perhaps it was his short stature. Or maybe the lack of a good fastball was the reason. Freitas was a control pitcher and relied almost entirely on his curveball and changeup. But he just had to get a major-league team to take a chance on him. And he did.

On May 5, 1932, Freitas, the “Portuguese Portsider,”5 took the mound for Sacramento on his 24th birthday and pitched a no-hit, no-run game against the Oakland Oaks. The performance did not go unnoticed. Connie Mack, owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, needed rotation depth for his three-time reigning American League champions and traded Jimmie DeShong and cash to get Freitas.

Freitas debuted for the A’s on May 31, 1932, at Shibe Park against the Washington Senators and turned in a splendid performance. He pitched 10 innings and allowed three runs on seven hits when Mack handed the ball to veteran George Earnshaw in the top of the 11th inning. The A’s lost the game, 5-4, in the 12th.

Freitas played two seasons with the Athletics. He had a 12-5 record in 1932 but fell to 2-4 with one save6 in 1933 before he was optioned to Double-A Portland. In 1934 Freitas turned himself around with the St. Paul Saints in the Double-A American Association and he was traded to Cincinnati for Jim Lindsey, Ivey Shiver, and cash.7 He played three seasons for the Reds, starting with a 6-12 record and one save in 1934 and a 5-10 record with two saves in 1935.8

 

Tony Freitas. (Trading Card Database)

 

In the 1936 season, Freitas got off to a slow 0-2 start and the Reds sold him to the Columbus Red Birds, a Double-A St. Louis Cardinals affiliate. For a second time (counting the California judge as the first time), Freitas applied his charm. He persuaded the Cardinals’ general manager, Branch Rickey, to transfer him from Columbus to the Sacramento Solons9 in the PCL, also a St. Louis affiliate, so that he could be closer to home. Rickey arranged it to happen in 1937.

More than halfway across the country from Sacramento, Thomas made the rounds. He advanced quickly early in his career but then got stalled in the higher minors over the next nine years. From 1928 through 1936, Thomas was sold, traded, or otherwise transferred from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Indiana to Tennessee, back to Pennsylvania where he started, then Louisiana, with a couple of short stops in Texas and Wisconsin mixed in. It seemed that the road was his home.

With a record of 159-145 in 419 appearances from 1926 through 1936, the scouts undoubtedly were bird-dogging Thomas. Yet he never got the call. Major-league teams could not have had the same doubts about Thomas’s body type that they had with Freitas. Also, Thomas was a good fielder (so was Freitas) and a good hitter (Freitas was not).

Perhaps, instead, Thomas’s lack of a good fastball was the reason the scouts shied away from him. Like Freitas, Thomas was a curveball pitcher, with good control. His 3.71 career ERA was serviceable, not stellar.

As fate would have it, these two pitching giants—figuratively speaking, in Freitas’s case—turned up in the Pacific Coast League on the same day—Opening Day, April 3, 1937. In December 1936 the Seattle Indians traded an aging Ed Wells to get Thomas. Sacramento hosted Seattle on Opening Day. Freitas pitched and lost to the Indians, 6-4. The next day, Thomas pitched Seattle to a 7-3 win over Sacramento. The six years from 1937 through 1942 give statisticians a perfect lens through which to view and compare these two stars.

Thomas played for four PCL teams in 1937-1942: Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and Hollywood.10 In those seasons, he pitched 1,566 innings in 269 games with a won-lost record of 89-103.11 He turned 38 before the 1943 campaign began. Thomas was probably too old to jump to the big leagues at the time, even with the hundreds of vacancies created by the major leaguers who went off to war.

Meanwhile, happy to be home in Sacramento, Freitas ran off two consecutive 20-win seasons in 1937 and ‘38. Branch Rickey told Freitas that he would like to buy his contract to come back and play in the majors again. To Rickey’s astonishment, Freitas explained that he would prefer to remain in Sacramento. He had his reasons: Freitas liked the regularity of the PCL schedule; he disliked the weather away from California; and the opposing lineups were tougher in the big leagues. Besides, he had already experienced the triumph of being there. So, he stayed in Sacramento. From 1937 to 1942, Freitas pitched 1,839 innings in 244 games and won at least 20 games each season. His won-lost record was 133-88.

In 1943, at the height of his playing career and coming off a remarkable 1942 season when he helped the Solons win their first league championship with a save and a win in a doubleheader on the final day of the season, Freitas enlisted in the US Army Air Forces (renamed from the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941.)

After the 1943 season, Thomas once again bounced around the country. The Hollywood Stars sold his contract to the Knoxville Smokies, a lower classified team (Class A1) in the Southern Association (which midway through the season moved and became the Mobile Bears). Three years later, Thomas landed in Houma, Louisiana, in the Class-D Evangeline League. At the age of 41, Thomas’s performance in 1946 was outstanding. He pitched 353 innings, won 35 games, and lost only seven.

The legendary Bill James says this about Thomas’s season: “Now granted, that wasn’t much of a league, but 35 wins are a bunch. No other pitcher, anywhere in organized baseball, at any age, has won 35 games in any other season since 1922.”12

The little information published about Thomas’s personal life and personality creates an impression that he was mysterious, or sullen, or ornery—or all three. One sportswriter called him “somewhat screwy.”13

Once when Thomas was in Portland playing for the Beavers, he and his batterymate, George Dickey (younger brother of New York Yankee Bill Dickey), exchanged punches in the dugout, accusing each other of costing the game they just lost.14 Another time, when Thomas played for the Houma Indians, he was suspended and fined $25 for “using profanity on the field.”15 In baseball, all players are competitive. Some are quietly competitive, like Tony Freitas. Some are less quiet, like Bill Thomas.

Much has been written about rampant gambling in the minor leagues during the post-World War II years. In 1947 the Houma team, which had won the 1946 league championship by a wide margin, was investigated on allegations that several players, including Thomas, were involved in throwing games during the prior year’s playoffs. One of the accusations against Thomas is explained in this way: After World War II, “the Brooklyn Dodgers engaged in a thorough housekeeping of the Mobile farm club” by assigning older players to Houma to make room for younger players in Mobile, and those assigned players “who were good enough for higher levels of ball, were willing to play in Class D for the benefits of dealing with the gamblers in Louisiana.”16

In January 1947, Houma’s manager and four players—Thomas and two others from Houma and one from Abbeville, Houma’s playoff opponent—were banned from baseball for life by the National Association, then the minor leagues’ governing body. Thomas and one other player successfully appealed and were reinstated 2½ years later.17

Thomas finished the 1949 season with Houma and then played the next years for whichever team would take him—all in the low minors. He pitched 728 innings after his 42nd birthday and accumulated 52 more wins. Thomas retired after the 1952 season at age 47.

When Freitas came out of the service in 1946, he was a little rusty but was still able to compete at the minor leagues’ highest level (AAA, or “Triple A,” under baseball’s new scheme) for four more seasons with Sacramento. He lost his string of 20-win seasons, but he collected 45 wins against 53 losses.

In the next four seasons, first with Modesto then with Stockton, in the Class-C California League, Freitas pitched 1,048 innings after his 42nd birthday. Like Thomas, Freitas too was able to put up good numbers against the younger minor leaguers—20, 25, 18, and 22 wins in 1950-1953 (in the second and fourth of those seasons, he led the league).

Before he retired as a player, he was the player-manager of Modesto and Stockton for one season each. After that he coached and then managed the Sacramento Solons in 1954 and 1955 before fully retiring from the game. Freitas said in various interviews that he might not have been cut out to be a manager, but that he had no regrets about his playing career.

It was a remarkable quarter-century in an interesting time in minor-league history for W.C. and Little Tony—men who were not so different in so many ways, but worlds apart in others.

That’s the long and short of it.

LEN PASCULLI is a retired lawyer and adjunct professor born in one of baseball’s alleged birthplaces, Hoboken, New Jersey. He has been a SABR member since 2001 and writes for SABR’s BioProject. Besides playing pickleball and pulling out what’s left of his curly hair while managing his Rotisserie League baseball teams, Len enjoys cooking, as well as traveling with his wife, Jan, and their children and grandchildren.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to SABR members Zak Ford and David Jerome for sharing their interest in and information on these two subjects deriving from their unpublished research, Ford on Freitas and Jerome on Thomas; to Tom Emerson and Frank Longo, SABR members and longtime friends, for their editorial assistance; and to Cassidy Lent, manager of reference services at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, for supplying copies of news clippings from the files in Cooperstown.

This article was edited by Thomas Rathkamp and fact-checked by Mike Huber.

 

NOTES

1 Very little personal information on Thomas has been found in the public domain at this time. The birth information cited here is from Thomas’s World War II draft card application available through Ancestry.com. The other birth dates appear elsewhere. The SABR site contains a collection of The Sporting News Player Contract Cards including one on Thomas. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum library has no file on Thomas. Two SABR researchers corroborated the absence of personal information about Thomas: George W. Hilton in the final paragraph of “The Evangeline League Scandal of 1946” (published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal in 1982) and David Jerome in an email to the author on January 12, 2024.

2 For purposes of this article, the statistics used for Thomas, Martina, Payne, and Freitas were those published in the SABR book Minor League Baseball Stars, vol. I (1978) [all three volumes are available online at https://profile.sabr.org/page/research-resources], which were later compiled in Lloyd Johnson, ed., The Minor League Register (First Edition) (Durham, North Carolina: Baseball America, Inc., 1994). The author compared the two sources and found that they were identical except where Johnson made one improvement: He included in Thomas’s statistics the one game he pitched (and lost) for the Wenatchee Chiefs on July 31, 1937, before William G. Bramham, the president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, disallowed the trade between the Seattle Indians and the Chiefs that included Thomas. The statistics published by baseball-reference.com for the four pitchers are different from those appearing in the SABR book and in the Register. The author contacted baseball-reference.com with some suggested improvements on the Freitas statistics and was advised that “[B-R’s] process for reviewing historical minor league data is to work through each leagueseason systemically. They have written up a summary of their working methods here, which may be of interest: https://www.chadwick-bureau.com/doc/historical/. This is a very active area of research, so coverage of this era should be much more complete over the coming few years.” (Aidan Jackson-Evans, Sports Reference, LLC, personal communications [via email], January 3, 2024.)

3 More about Martina and Payne, whose careers were done before World War II: Martina played only eight games in Class AA (the then highest level of minor leagues), but he did pitch in 24 games for the Washington Nationals in the American League in 1924—a 34-year-old rookie. (He managed a 6-and-8 record.) Payne pitched in more high-minors games than Martina did, but he appeared in only 12 major-league games. At age 31, he played for the 1920 Chicago White Sox with teammates who had not yet been banned from baseball, and he picked up one win and one loss. Payne’s final win came in 1940 with the Worthington (Minnesota) Cardinals, a Class-D affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals in the Western League, when he was 51 years old. It must be at least mentioned when looking at the closeness of the number of wins among Martina (349), Payne (348), and Freitas (342) that the bulk of Martina’s and Payne’s wins came in minor leagues classified below Double A, while Freitas’s wins were mostly in Double A/Triple A, and that neither pitcher lost time during his careers as Freitas did, although Martina did retire at 41, which was much younger than the age at which the other two retired.

4 Society for American Baseball Research, Minor League Baseball Stars, vol. II (1985), 9-14.

5 First use of this nickname for Tony Freitas first appeared in Pacific Coast News Service, “Tony Freitas of Oakland Sacs’ Hero,” The Oakland PostEnquirer, April 19, 1930: 23. It appeared in newspapers across the country after that.

6 Saves were not an official major-league statistic until 1969. Saves noted of pitchers before that were awarded retroactively by researchers.

7 This trade was so typical of the deal structure in which minor-league teams frequently engaged during this time period. Lindsey and Shiver were on the downside of their career; Freitas was a young prospect. And the often-struggling minor-league team always welcomed a cash component from the major-league team.

8 Freitas was good enough to be the starting pitcher on Opening Day on two occasions in the majors. He did it once in each league, a rarity: On April 12, 1933, he opened the season for the Athletics in the AL and on April 16, 1935, for the Reds in the NL. He lost both games.

9 The Sacramento Senators changed their name to the Solons after the Cardinals purchased the team in 1935. Sacramento is California’s state capital and Solon was an ancient Greek legislator; “solon” is also slang for a member of a legislative body.

10 Thomas played one game for the new Wenatchee (Washington) Chiefs in the Class-B Western International League on July 31, 1937. See Note 2 above.

11 In 1943, his final year in the PCL, Thomas played for Hollywood while Freitas was in the military, so his stats for that year are not included in the comparison between the two pitchers: Thomas pitched 249 innings in 52 games, but his record slipped to 11-21 before he was sold to Knoxville.

12 Bill James, The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Villard Books, 1986), 198.

13 Tom Anderson, “From Up Close,” Knoxville Journal, April 30, 1944: 11.

14 Associated Press, “Pitcher, Catcher Fight in Dugout,” Nevada State Journal (Reno), August 23, 1938: 8.

15 “Thomas Fined $25, Suspended,” The Sporting News, June 5, 1946: 32.

16 George W. Hilton, “The Evangeline League Scandal of 1946,” Baseball Research Journal (SABR), 1982.

17 Thomas did not play professional baseball in 1930, for a reason that has not yet been determined. Taken together with the Evangeline incident, he lost a total of 3 1/2 years of pro ball.