Although Johnson desperately wanted a franchise in New York City, the politically powerful New York Giants successfully prevented the AL from moving there. Instead, Johnson placed a team in Baltimore and recruited John McGraw to lead the new franchise. The ballclub was incorporated as the “Baltimore Baseball and Athletic Company” and originally issued 400 shares of stock valued at $100 apiece. The initial incorporators included players McGraw and Robinson, Justice Harry Goldman, Eutaw House proprietor Col. James P. Shannon, St. Vincent’s Catholic Church pastor Reverend John D. Boland, city tax judge Conway W. Sams, and Baltimore businessmen S. Miles Brinkley and Moses N. Frank.2

Baltimore fans waited out two consecutive rainouts before celebrating Opening Day on April 26, 1901. The afternoon festivities included a procession of nearly 50 carriages from the Eutaw House Hotel to American League Park and pregame activities included Johnson throwing the ceremonial first pitch.3 The Orioles won their inaugural game over the Boston Americans in front of over 10,000 fans, 10-6, led by Mike Donlin’s two triples and Joe McGinnity’s complete game.4 The Orioles occupied second place during mid-May, then slumped to fourth place following a four-game losing streak.

The team endured a challenging early June. After winning their first two games that month, the Orioles lost eight of their next ten contests. They fell to sixth place and 7½ games behind the league-leading Chicago White Sox following a 7–6 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers. The Orioles had built a 6–1 lead after six innings and outhit Milwaukee 15-13, but the Brewers scored six unanswered runs, winning the 10-inning contest on a sacrifice fly following an errant throw. Frustrated with the team’s ability to lose ballgames apparently within their grasp, one newspaper reporter noted, “If the defeats in themselves are becoming somewhat monotonous, the Orioles manage to have a charming variety in the methods by which they lose.”5

Throughout the season, McGraw attempted to improve his team by recruiting players from other teams, including NL ballclubs. One of McGraw’s top targets was his previous teammate and future Hall of Fame shortstop Hughie Jennings. Jennings was traded from Louisville to Baltimore in 1893 and played with the NL Orioles through the 1898 season, where he became the NL’s top shortstop. Throughout June, four different ballclubs sought Jennings’ services, including Baltimore, the AL Philadelphia Athletics, and the NL Philadelphia Phillies.6

Although McGraw stated Jennings would play in Baltimore, President Johnson overrode McGraw and recognized the Athletics’ claim, stating “Law and order must prevail in the American League, and the Baltimore club will not be allowed to have its own way any more than any other club. McGraw hasn’t a leg to stand upon in this matter, and if he drives Jennings into the National League the Athletic club deserves some redress for which Baltimore should be held responsible.”7

McGraw rebutted Johnson’s remarks, claiming Jennings hadn’t been claimed when negotiations occurred, and that Johnson interfered because of his friendly relationship with Athletics’ owner Connie Mack. Jennings ultimately played for neither the Orioles nor the Athletics, opting for the Phillies instead. The dispute over Jennings foreshadowed future McGraw-Johnson tussles.

The next day Baltimore defeated Milwaukee 11-4, the first of 11 consecutive wins, their longest winning streak that season. Their victories included sweeps of Detroit and Philadelphia and moved the Orioles into third place. Unfortunately, injuries to McGraw, Robinson, and other key players, along with frequent umpire troubles, led to a late season swoon and eventual fifth-place finish.8 The Orioles struggled during early September, compiling a 4-19-2 record from August 27 through September 18, then finished the season on a high note, winning eight straight before losing the season finale; after their eighth-straight win, one reporter observed, “There was nothing sensational about the game, but throughout there was the pleasant feeling of hopeful confidence.”9 Their late September streak pushed Baltimore back over the .500 mark, widening the gap between them and the sixth-place Washington Senators.

Based on their early season success, fans “confidently expected that by this time they would certainly be running neck and neck for second place and more probably fighting desperately for first.”10 The Orioles ultimately compiled a 68-65 record, 13½ games behind the pennant-winning Chicago White Sox. The Orioles led the AL with a .294 team batting average and a .353 team on-base average, while finishing third with 761 runs and 1,348 hits. McGraw, who managed and played third base before a mid-season injury, led the team with a .349 batting average and .995 OPS while pacing the AL with 14 hit-by-pitches in only 308 plate appearances; outfielder Mike Donlin led the full-season regulars with a .340 batting average and .883 OPS. Second baseman Jimmy Williams and shortstop Bill Keister each hit 21 triples and drove in over 90 runs. Baltimore’s pitching staff, which had the highest average age in the league (29.0 years), attained a fourth-best 3.73 ERA, collectively struck out a league-low 271 opponents, and issued a near-league average 344 walks. Joe McGinnity, returning to Baltimore and among those jumping from the NL to the AL, led Orioles hurlers with a 3.56 ERA, 26 wins, and 382 innings. The American League thrived during its first year as a self-proclaimed major league, and only one franchise changed locations during the off-season. (The Milwaukee Brewers moved to St. Louis and were renamed the Browns.)

The Orioles started 1902 on the right foot. On January 1, Baltimore announced they signed Joe McGinnity to a three-year deal. McGinnity had been pursued by the NL’s Brooklyn Superbas; he had been assigned to Brooklyn before the 1900 season, then jumped to Baltimore before the 1901 season. As the season approached, McGraw set his everyday lineup with shortstop Billy Gilbert leading off, followed by outfielder Jimmy Sheckard, third baseman Joe Kelley, outfielder Cy Seymour, second baseman Jimmy Williams, outfielder Kip Selbach, first baseman Dan McGann, the catcher, and the pitcher.11 The Orioles’ roster experienced significant turnover during the season; only Harry Howell, Wilbert Robinson, Gilbert, Seymour, Selbach, and Williams played in at least half of Baltimore’s 138 games.

Similar to their inaugural season, the Orioles planned a gala parade for Opening Day 1902. On April 23, the procession would leave the Eutaw House and travel throughout the city to the ballgrounds. There were plans for “12 mounted patrolmen and Packard’s Band of 30 pieces” as well. However, unlike the previous season, no complimentary tickets were issued for Opening Day.12 Due to a last-minute scheduling change, the Orioles opened their 1902 campaign in Boston before returning to Baltimore and hosting the Athletics for the home opener. On April 19, Baltimore carried a 6-3 lead heading into the ninth inning, scoring insurance runs during the eighth and ninth frames. Unfortunately for the Orioles, a late Boston rally resulted in four answered runs as Baltimore dropped the season opener.13 They didn’t fare better in their home opener, losing to Philadelphia, 8-1, though over 10,000 fans attended the ballgame.14

Baltimore endured a challenging season. Although the Orioles won four of their next six contests, they lost their next five games and slipped to seventh place. The team struggled and McGraw argued with Johnson and AL umpires while the wheels were set in motion for his eventual jump to the New York Giants. After May 2, the Orioles’ highest placement for the season was fourth place; their last day in the league’s upper division was June 14. However, there were reasons for hope throughout the season’s first half. On May 9, McGraw returned from a five-game suspension, and the Orioles “played like a new team” as they defeated Philadelphia, 13-6, to end their five-game losing streak and knock the Athletics from the AL’s top spot. The ballclub was praised for resurrecting the hit-and-run, Gilbert’s excellent fielding was commended, and Williams homered.15 On May 30, the Orioles swept a doubleheader from Cleveland, winning by scores of 10-7 and 12-4. The opening line from the Baltimore Sun’s game recap read: “It was a great day for Baltimore — a great day.”16

Baltimore split the next four games; the last time the Orioles had a .500 or better winning percentage was on June 4. Their season started spiraling downward in late June and reached a low point on July 17, when they were forced to forfeit a game against the St. Louis Browns, the day after McGraw joined the New York Giants as manager. A few weeks earlier, on June 30, Johnson had suspended McGraw and Joseph Kelley indefinitely for their actions during the previous Saturday’s ballgame against Boston. Johnson commented on McGraw’s actions, “I have had time enough since I returned from the North to make a thorough investigation of this Baltimore trouble, and I am convinced that Umpire Connolly was absolutely right.”17 Robinson was named manager in McGraw’s absence. Infuriated with his continued treatment by Johnson, McGraw left the AL for the Giants, where he would manage for 31 seasons and win over 2500 ballgames.

In addition to securing McGraw, the Giants signed McGinnity, Cronin, Bresnahan, and McGann to contracts — and Kelley and Seymour jumped to Cincinnati — leaving the Orioles without enough players to field a team.18 Johnson pieced together a roster with players from other AL clubs — and the old Baltimore NL club19 — so the Orioles could finish the season. The Orioles stumbled to the finish line, compiling an 8-20 record in August and 5-23 record in September, which included an 11-game losing streak.

Baltimore finished last at 50-88, 34 games behind the pennant-winning Philadelphia Athletics. Outfielder Kip Selbach, one of only three Orioles to play at least 100 games that season, lead the team in most offensive categories: plate appearances (573), runs (86), hits (161), and batting average (.320), with second baseman Jimmy Williams tallying the most triples (21), home runs (8), and best OPS (.861) on the team. McGinnity, despite leaving for New York in July, still led Baltimore hurlers with 13 wins and a 3.44 ERA, and finished second with 198⅔ innings pitched, just behind Harry Howell’s 199 innings.

President Johnson successfully moved the AL Orioles’ franchise from Baltimore to New York for the 1903 season.20 In March, the American League’s New York franchise was approved and commenced operations, incorporated as the Greater New York Baseball Association.21 The rebranded New York Americans, variously nicknamed “Hilltoppers” and “Highlanders” in the press for the playing field located on elevated terrain, and “Yankees” possibly tongue-in-cheek because the ballpark was slightly north of the Giants’, would use “Yankees” as the team’s primary nickname starting in 1913.22 The AL would not return to Baltimore for over fifty years, until the 1954 season when the St. Louis Browns moved east and became the second AL incarnation of the Orioles.

Though the franchise shifted from Baltimore to New York, the statistics associated with the 1901–02 Baltimore Orioles have been relegated to those of a defunct organization. The New York Yankees don’t recognize the Baltimore Orioles in their official team records. Baseball-Reference.com published an article on the debate in 2014.23 The current Baltimore Orioles trace their history from the AL charter member Milwaukee Brewers, through the St. Louis Browns and the 1953 season, to Baltimore in time for the 1954 campaign.

The 1901–02 Baltimore Orioles left a notable mark on baseball history during their short existence. Baltimore compiled a 118-153 record over their two seasons. The Orioles had only two managers in its history: Hall of Famers McGraw and Robinson, who both later managed New York-based NL teams (Robinson joining Brooklyn, where he would manage 1914-31). Their biggest hitting and pitching stars — Jimmy Williams was their best offensive player, while Joe McGinnity more firmly established his status as a top-tier major league pitcher–would shine in New York over the next five years for the Yankees and Giants, respectively. Bitterness lingered between Johnson and McGraw; the 1904 World Series wasn’t played in large part because McGraw didn’t want his Giants to play the AL pennant winner, spiting Johnson and his attempts to establish the AL’s status as equal to the NL.

These early Baltimore Orioles should be remembered as having a key location for a major league franchise, serving a critical role in the evolution of the AL-NL relationship, and the lasting impact on New York baseball, between McGraw’s tenure with the Giants, Robinson’s years with the Robins (later Dodgers), and the franchise’s rebirth as the New York Yankees.

GORDON J. GATTIE is an engineer for the US Navy. His baseball research interests include ballparks, historical trends, and statistical analysis. A SABR member since 1998, Gordon earned his PhD from SUNY Buffalo, where he used baseball to investigate judgment performance in complex dynamic environments. Ever the optimist, he dreams of a Cleveland Indians-Washington Nationals World Series matchup, especially after the Nationals’ 2019 World Series championship. Lisa, his wonderful wife who roots for the Yankees, and Morrigan, their beloved Labrador Retriever, are looking forward to resuming their cross-country travels visiting ballparks and other baseball-related sites. Gordon has contributed to several SABR publications, including The National Pastime and the Games Project.

Additional Sources

Kavanagh, Jack, and Norman Macht, Uncle Robbie (Cleveland, OH: Society for American Baseball Research, 1999): 11-47.

Koppett, Leonard, The Man in the Dugout (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1993): 30-67.

Levitt, Daniel R., The Battle that Forged Modern Baseball: The Federal League Challenge and Its Legacy (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 2012).

Retrosheet: http://www.retrosheet.org/

Thorn, John (2012). The House That McGraw Built. On “Our Game” blog, https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-house-that-mcgraw-built-2bf6f75aa8dc.

Notes

1 Joe Santry and Cindy Thompson, “Byron Bancroft Johnson,” In David Jones (Ed.), Deadball Stars of the American League (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), 390-392.

2 “Ball Club Incorporation: Baltimore’s American League Team With $40,000 Of Stock,” Baltimore Sun, January 5, 1901, 6.

3 Jimmy Keenan, “April 26, 1901: Baltimore Orioles Win Home Opener in a New Major League,” SABR Games Project, https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/april-26-1901-baltimore-orioles-win-home-opener-new-major-league. Accessed December 1, 2019.

4 “’Rah For Baseball,” Baltimore Sun, April 27, 1901, 6.

5 “Orioles Ten Inning Defeat,” Baltimore Sun, June 18, 1901, 6.

6 C. Paul Rodgers III, “Hugh Ambrose Jennings,” in David Jones (Ed.), Deadball Stars of the American League (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), 555-558.

7 “Hot Baseball Row,” Baltimore Sun, June 18, 1901, 6.

8 Francis Richter (Ed.) Reach’s Official American League Base Ball Guide for 1902 (Philadelphia: A.J. Reach, 1902), 56.

9 “Can’t Stop Winning,” Baltimore Sun, September 28, 1901, 6.

10 “Baseball Ends Today,” Baltimore Sun, September 28, 1901, 6.

11 Frank F. Patterson, “Is Ready to Play,” The Sporting News, April 19, 1902, 3.

12 “Orioles’ Opening Program,” Baltimore Sun, April 19, 1902, 6.

13 “Orioles Lose First,” Baltimore Sun, April 20, 1902, 6.

14 “Athletics Play Havoc With Manager McGraw’s Pet Birds,” The Washington Times, April 24, 1902, 4.

15 “Win a Game At Last,” Baltimore Sun, May 10, 1902, 6.

16 “’Twas a Great Day,” Baltimore Sun, May 31, 1902, 6.

17 “Ban Suspends Again,” Baltimore Sun, July 1, 1902, 6.

18 “Giants Strengthened By Sensational Deal,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 17, 1902, 11.

19 “Here’s the New Team,” Baltimore Sun, July 18, 1902, 6.

20 John Thorn, Pete Palmer, and Michael Gershman (Eds.) Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball (4th Edition) New York: Viking Press, 1995), 43.

21 Mark Armour and Daniel R. Levitt, “New York Yankees Team Ownership History,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/new-york-yankees-team-ownership-history/. Accessed July 7, 2020.

22 New York Yankees, History of the New York Yankees, 2018 New York Yankees Official Media Guide and Record Book, 244.

23 Mike Lynch, “1901-02 Orioles Removed from Yankees History,” On “Sports Reference Blog, https://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2014/07/1901-02-orioles-removed-from-yankees-history/. Accessed December 1, 2019.

The city of Baltimore has hosted a number of historic baseball events. Although this story barely qualifies as such, it is nevertheless an interesting aside involving Jerry Sullivan, a 32-year-old, 3-foot-11 stage actor who appeared in an Eastern League game in Baltimore in 1905. Forty-six years later, the St. Louis Browns famously inserted 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel into a major league contest as a pinch-hitter. However, unlike Gaedel, Sullivan wielded a regulation bat. Not only that, he singled and scored a run. (There is no evidence Sullivan’s feat inspired Bill Veeck’s stunt of hiring Gaedel, or that Veeck even knew about it.)

The game in which Sullivan participated has been documented previously — with varying degrees of accuracy — standing in stark contrast to the meager facts previously published about his life. The events that conspired to bring Jeremiah David Sullivan to home plate in Baltimore began with his birth on August 12, 1873, in Low, Québec, a logging town founded by Irish immigrants.1 Jerry’s name honored his twenty-year-old brother, who drowned two months before Jerry’s birth while driving logs downriver.2

Jerry’s head and torso developed normally during infancy but his extremities did not, and doctors informed the family that their son would never reach four feet in height. Often ridiculed at school, Jerry later revealed he had learned to entertain in the classroom — his defining moment a second-grade assignment requiring the presentation of a humorous verse to classmates. Jerry was astonished when his recitation elicited laughter and approval, and he claimed to have returned to his seat “a bit wobbly.”3

Jerry moved soon after that with his family to Wausau, Wisconsin, where physical limitations, both real and perceived, ended his schooling and limited his career options.4 He began capitalizing on his ability to generate laughs. The local newspaper published a photograph of a teenage Jerry driving a tiny wagon pulled by a pair of goats. The wagon carried a large placard for the Mathie Brewing Company, promoting their bock beer, a strong German ale traditionally consumed by Wisconsinites each spring.5 Buoyed by the promotion’s success, Jerry left home to become an acrobat and contortionist with the Robinson Family Circus, and with a traveling medicine show hawking a “cure-all” elixir sold by Hamlin’s Wizard Oil Company.6

Jerry Sullivan, age 17, promoting the Mathie Brewing Company’s bock beer.

During his travels throughout the US and Canada for Wizard Oil, Jerry occasionally exploited his athletic ability and comic timing in local baseball games. As early as 1892, a town team in Carroll, Iowa, drafted him to play against a female baseball squad from Denver. Sullivan stole the show, hitting a double while serving as the team’s catcher. Judging his performance behind the plate “wonderful,” an anonymous journalist proclaimed, “Little Jerry is a curiosity and to see him play ball is worth all the cost to attend the entire performance.”7

When the Wizard Oil troupe visited Missoula, Montana, Jerry offered to umpire a rematch between Missoula’s town team and that of nearby Anaconda.8 Missoula achieved its revenge, a 26-2 win, with Sullivan praised as “the best umpire that has officiated the grounds this season and was a whole circus in himself.”9 The Anacondans were so impressed they invited him to join them the next week as a player. “He can catch, throw and hit with the best of them,” it was said after that contest, “and he is no slouch on the bases.”10

In 1899, Jerry made the vaudeville circuit and demonstrated his impressive athleticism with a popular tumbling act, mixing in some comedy wrestling along the way.11 His talent caught the attention of Gus Hill, a nationally renowned entertainer thanks to his amazing ability as a juggler of Indian clubs. Looking to expand his horizons, Hill was dipping his toes into the business end of vaudeville by forming a repertory company he dubbed the “Royal Lilliputians.”12 Jerry eagerly signed on; his signature moment involved steering a miniature fire engine pulled across the stage by a goat — an echo of his first taste of fame for Mathie Brewing. Hill then cast Sullivan in McFadden’s Row of Flats, a farce based on the comic strip The Yellow Kid, and in his national touring company of Simple Simon Simple. In Simple Simon Simple he played a featured character named Mose, who made his entrance by popping out of a laundry basket in which he had hidden, a startling introduction that always surprised and delighted audiences.13

Jerry Sullivan also found love, marrying Helen “Nellie” Bates, a chorus girl in the Simon production, at City Hall in New York City the day before St. Valentine’s Day 1901. Nellie’s father, who had discouraged her show-business ambitions, was less than thrilled at the turn of events. When interviewed at his home in St. Louis he remarked, “About a week ago I heard my daughter was going to marry this dwarf. I was surprised, as any father would be, at such news. But…she is old enough to know her own business, and I did not attempt to prevent it.”14

Nellie — who had adopted the stage name Helen von Deleur — said of her new spouse, “I saw him before I went on the stage two years ago and I fell in love with him at once. Then I got into the business and came into the same company last September and he fell in love with me.” When asked about the height difference — Nellie was 5-foot-4 — she laughed, “He’s mighty little for a husband, but I think it will be nice to have a husband I may pick up and shake when I feel like it.”15

More than a decade later, the Sullivans were among several stage couples profiled in a New York Press article and Nellie had grown weary of the inevitable questions, tersely responding, “One day we found out we were loving one another. Then we got married. Is there anything more to say about it?”16

Jerry Sullivan crisscrossed the country continuously for the next several years. While in Baltimore for Simple Simon Simple in September 1905, he crossed paths with Buffalo Bisons manager George Stallings, the man who would lead Boston’s “Miracle Braves” to a World Series title nine years later. The night before Buffalo was to play the Baltimore Orioles in a doubleheader, the notoriously superstitious Stallings spied Sullivan in a hotel lobby. He likely considered Sullivan a totem — in that era it was thought young African-American males, hunchbacks, and those with dwarfism proffered good luck. A hunchbacked little person was even better. Many sports teams employed them as human talismans.

Sullivan’s experience entertaining baseball fans further aroused Stallings’s interest and he invited the diminutive actor to the ballpark the next day to sit on the Bison bench. Buffalo was running out the string, giving Stallings some license, while Baltimore was only two games behind first-place Jersey City in the standings.

A delighted Stallings greeted Sullivan at the ballpark, and had his new pal take part in pregame practice. As the first game was about to begin, Jerry was escorted to the coaching lines by Bisons pitcher Rube Kisinger, mostly for the comic effect of seeing Kisinger, one of the team’s largest players, juxtaposed with a confidently striding Sullivan standing an inch short of four feet in height. Jerry “coached” for a couple of innings, entertaining the crowd as the Orioles jumped out to a 10-2 lead.17

After Buffalo’s Frank McManus singled in the ninth inning, Stallings summoned a pinch-hitter for pitcher Stan Yerkes. It was normal to see a substitute in that situation — what caught everyone off-guard was his identity. It was Jerry Sullivan, carrying a bat nearly as large as he was.18

The umpire formally announced Jerry’s entrance and the actor strutted to the plate while Baltimore pitcher Fred Burchell struggled to contain his laughter.19 After Burchell’s first pitch sailed high, he aimed the next one a little lower and Sullivan shocked everyone by swinging, looping the ball into left field as McManus ran to second.

Burchell attempted to pick-off the pint-sized baserunner. Sullivan scurried back safely, ducking between first baseman Tim Jordan’s legs and sitting down on the bag. Burchell made several more pick-off attempts but Sullivan was wise and remained safely within reach of first base.

Turning his attention to the batter, Burchell surrendered a single to Jake Gettman, scoring McManus while Sullivan scampered to second, putting an exclamation point on his accomplishment by hopping affirmatively onto the base with both feet. Burchell then threw a pitch over the catcher’s head and Sullivan scooted to third to great applause. Frank LaPorte, who a week later would make his major league debut with the New York Highlanders (now Yankees), lined out yet another single — adrenaline flowing, Sullivan played to the crowd in completing his circuit around the bases, punctuating his tally with an elaborately unnecessary slide into home plate.20 Buffalo ultimately scored four runs in the inning, but it was not enough and the Bisons lost, 10-6.

Despite his 1.000 batting average, Sullivan returned to stage work. Six weeks after his baseball diversion he appeared in Simple Simon Simple at Broadway’s West End Theatre, thereby briefly reaching the “big leagues” in his chosen profession.21 He continued traveling the country in Simon, which proved especially popular in the South, and in McFadden’s Flats, spending forty-nine weeks on the road.22

During the summer of 1907, Sullivan braved a deadly heat wave in Philadelphia to attend the National Elks Convention. Awarded the title of “Littlest Elk,” he earned a cash prize and the honor of participating in a massive parade through the city streets, accompanied of course by the “Tallest Elk.”23

Around this time, 22-year-old Bud Fisher created a comic strip that would alter Sullivan’s life. It debuted in the San Francisco Chronicle sports pages on November 15, 1907, as A. Mutt, featuring a character Fisher had created for a previous project.24 A few months later, “Jeff” made his first appearance as the diminutive sidekick to the long, gawky Mutt, and the two confronted a series of continual misfortunes, first connected to bad luck at the racetrack and later involving all manner of ill-fated get-rich-quick schemes.25

Jerry Sullivan in “Mutt and Jeff”

Retitled Mutt and Jeff, King Features syndicated the strip nationwide. Gus Hill secured the rights to stage the characters in a series of musical extravaganzas — with up to six companies on the road simultaneously — and Jerry Sullivan spent the next two decades as “Jeff,” performing all over North America. Bud Fisher would earn five thousand dollars a week from his creation, of which he had wisely retained ownership.26

Sullivan would earn much less than that. The life of a traveling vaudevillian produced notoriety, but little else. It was a vagabond existence, with most actors required to cover their own expenses.

He appeared in a few motion pictures — unfortunately among the thousands of early silent films lost over the years. When The Court Jester played in his hometown, the newspaper crowed, “Come and See Jerry Sullivan, a Wausau Boy.”27 A review in Moving Picture World said of Sullivan, “In this film the dwarf who made such a favorable impression in the fairy story The Little Old Men of the Woods plays a prominent part, and he does it, if anything, better than he performed his earlier task.”28 While conceding the “immortality” that film offered an actor, Sullivan, pontificating while puffing on a cigar, asserted his strong preference for the theater. “No matter what stage of perfection motion pictures reach,” he insisted to a reporter, “a play by living people will always be the principal source of amusement.”29

A final baseball reference for Sullivan appears in 1915, a three-inning pick-up game between two show business teams in New York. A recounting of the event calls him “the best player” and noted, “…his versatility has brought him much fame.”30

As the above quotation implies, one would be hard-pressed to locate a negative review of Jerry Sullivan. Hundreds of newspapers praised him, often as a local favorite making a return visit. During a wildly popular two-week run, the San Francisco Call declared, “Besides being a class A ‘funny’ man, Sullivan is a contortionist and athlete of no mean ability.”31 His fans in Texas considered him the obvious successor to the legendary Tom Thumb.32 More than two hundred Elks enthusiastically welcomed him to Roseburg, Oregon in 1916, with a parade through the streets of the town in which he had briefly lived.33

Nine-year-old Eloise Buch, hospitalized in Baltimore in March 1914 with a life-threatening illness, was perhaps Jerry’s biggest fan. After she requested to see “Jeff” in person, Sullivan twice visited her and was astonished to discover she had committed many of his lines to memory.34

Jerry was also a prankster. Since his head and torso were normal size, one of his favorite tricks involved walking into a restaurant and requesting a booster seat. While the server was off on his mission, Jerry would take a regular seat at the table and watch with amusement when the waiter returned and searched for him in vain.35

Sullivan continued playing “Jeff” through the mid-1920s. However, the advent of sound in motion pictures resulted in a precipitous decline in vaudeville’s popularity, and Jerry’s fortunes took a sadly parallel track. He briefly returned to circus life in 1929, before joining two other little people for shows at Wonderland on Coney Island.36 Jobs scarce, Jerry began frequenting the bar at the Circus Room of the Cumberland Hotel in New York, to ill effect.37

He moved into the Luna Villa, a three-story residential hotel on Coney Island, near the amusement parks where he could occasionally find odd roles, including a sideshow in which he was billed as “Jerry the Dwarf.”38 In September 1937, Sullivan was placed under arrest after drunkenly standing on a street corner and heckling a dozen members of the American Legion, shouting at them, “You’re all phonies. You’ve never been across the seas. I could lick you.”39 The Legionnaires laughed it off, but when a police officer advised Jerry to “mind his own business or he might get hurt,” Sullivan challenged the officer, culminating in a visit to the drunk tank.40 Hauled before a judge the next morning, Sullivan gave the magistrate a military salute. Admitting having been drunk he insisted, “I’m all right now.” The judge asked, “Will you be a good boy from now on?” The 64-year-old replied in the affirmative and received a suspended sentence. His career as an entertainer went unmentioned.41

In December 1940, Sullivan attended the funeral of five-hundred-pound “Jolly Irene,” a former Barnum & Bailey sideshow performer with whom he had appeared at Coney Island.42 The marriage with Nellie was certainly all but over by this time; the Census that year listed Jerry as married, but living alone.43

Sullivan then disappears. He likely died before 1953; his brother William passed away that year and Jerry was not listed among the surviving siblings.44 Sadly, Jerry Sullivan’s fascinating life and considerable talents as an acrobat and comic have been almost completely forgotten — except for the day in Baltimore when he swung a baseball bat.

DENNIS SNELLING is a three-time Casey Award finalist for Best Baseball Book of the Year, including for “The Greatest Minor League: A History of the Pacific Coast League,” and “Lefty O’Doul: Baseball’s Forgotten Ambassador,” which was runner-up for the award in 2017. He was a 2015 Seymour Medal finalist for “Johnny Evers: A Baseball Life.” Snelling is an active member of the Dusty Baker & Lefty O’Doul SABR chapters in Northern California, and is an Associate Superintendent for a school district in Roseville, California.

Sources

All photos are in the public domain.

Ancestry.com

California State Library

Duluth Public Library

Familysearch.com

Genealogy Bank.com

Google Books

Internet Archive

Newspapers.com

San Francisco Public Library

Notes

1 World War I Draft Registration Card, Jeremiah David Sullivan, September 11, 1918.

2 “John Kelly & Mary Douglas Family History,” provided by Dot Fischer, November 7, 2018.

3 Jackson (MS) Daily News, November 8, 1912, 6.

4 United States Census, 1940.

5 Janin Friend, “A Forgotten Easter Tradition,” Wausau Daily Herald, March 31, 1983, 24.

6 Green Bay Press Gazette, March 21, 1893, 3. Hamlin’s Wizard Oil was a “cure-all” tonic patented by a magician. As was the case with such elixirs, it consisted mostly of alcohol. Performers sang from wagons, eventually gaining popularity such that they performed in local opera houses and other stage venues, adding specialty acts such as Jerry Sullivan.

7 Carroll (IA) Sentinel, October 15, 1892, 3.

8 Daily Missoulian, June 16, 1895, 1; June 22, 1895, 2.

9 Anaconda Standard, June 17, 1895, 6.

10 Anaconda Standard, June 24, 1895, 3.

11 St. Paul Globe, December 7, 1899, 6.

12 Buffalo Enquirer, July 20, 1900, 5.

13 Daily Illinois State Register, November 5, 1900, 6.

14 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 22, 1901, 8. The attitude of Nellie’s father was influenced by his wife’s abandonment of the family a year earlier to pursue acting studies in Brooklyn, resulting in a divorce that made headlines in St. Louis. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 11, 1899, 1; November 12, 1899, 8; December 7, 1899, 10).

15 St. Louis Republic, February 22, 1901, 1.

16 New York Press, December 8, 1912, 6.

17 Buffalo Enquirer, September 21, 1905, 10.

18 Baltimore Sun, September 19, 1905, 8, Buffalo Courier, September 19, 1905, 9.

19 Buffalo Courier, September 19, 1905, 9; Buffalo Morning Express, September 19, 1905, 9.

20 Baltimore Sun, September 19, 1905, 8; Buffalo Courier, September 19, 1905, 9; Buffalo Enquirer, September 21, 1905, 10.

21 New York Times, October 29, 1905, 3.

22 Montgomery (AL) Advertiser, November 24, 1906, 10; Billboard, August 17, 1907, 33.

23 Philadelphia Inquirer, July 15, 1907, 5; July 18, 1907, 4. Jerry also performed at the Lit Brothers department store, with several other entertainers. (Philadelphia Inquirer, July 14, 1907, 5.)

24 San Francisco Chronicle, November 15, 1907, 8; November 16, 1907, 5; November 17, 1907, 17.

25 San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 1908, 8.

26 The Economist, December 22, 2012; Don Markstein’s Toonpedia, toonpedia.com/muttjeff.htm, accessed February 4, 2020.

27 Wausau Daily Herald, May 4, 1910, 8.

28 Moving Picture World, March 12, 1910, Volume 6, Number 10, 384.

29 Baltimore Sun, March 9, 1914, 4.

30 New York Evening World, June 28, 1915, 14.

31 San Francisco Call, February 10, 1913, 4.

32 Houston Post, October 8, 1916, 41.

33 Roseburg Review, March 15, 1916, 1 & 6.

34 Baltimore Sun, March 14, 1914, 12 & 16. Eloise recovered, eventually becoming a public health nurse. (York Dispatch, July 30, 1981, 42.)

35 Asheville Citizen, September 11, 1907, 6.

36 Billboard, July 27, 1929, 80.

37 Billboard, February 9, 1935, 65.

38 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 1, 1940, A13.

39 Camden (NJ) Courier-Post, September 24, 1937, 5.

40 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 24, 1937, 6; New York Daily News, September 24, 1937, 10. Wire services distributed the story nationally.

41 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 24, 1937, 6.

42 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 1, 1940, A13.

43 United States Census, 1940.

44 Duluth Tribune, December 5, 1953 5.

Babe Ruth began his professional baseball career in 1914 as a member of the Baltimore Orioles, a minor-league team in the International League. Long-time Baltimore Sun sportswriter Jesse Linthicum witnessed firsthand Ruth’s 19 weeks with the Orioles. “I saw Babe Ruth hit his first home run, pitch his first game and obtain the nickname of Babe,” he wrote in 1948.1

Linthicum was at St. Mary’s Industrial School in February 1914 when 19-year-old Ruth was summoned to the school’s reception room to meet Jack Dunn, the owner and manager of the Orioles. A number of Ruth’s school teammates and small kids from St. Mary’s who idolized him accompanied him to the office. Dunn, who had never seen Ruth play, had heard plenty about the school superstar — a highly-rated pitcher and hitter, capable of playing every position. He was a left-handed thrower and a switch hitter who hit .537 in 1913.

Dunn, who sought big ballplayers, liked the fact that Ruth was over six feet tall, muscular, and weighed a lean 183 pounds. After Ruth accepted Dunn’s contract offer without the slightest hesitation, the St. Mary’s ballplayers responded like a well-rehearsed chorus. “There goes our ball club,” they moaned.2

When Ruth and the Orioles arrived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for spring training, Ruth made an immediate impression in the team’s first inter-squad game. “The youngster landed on a fastball and circled the bases before Billy Morrisette had retrieved the hit in deep right field,” a sportswriter reported.3 Linthicum called him “a prestigious clout that sent the locals down to main street talking to themselves.” As Linthicum trailed Ruth and Dunn while heading back to the hotel following the game, the writer heard Dunn say, “This Baby will never get away from me,” and according to Linthicum, “Then and there Ruth acquired the nickname of ‘Babe.’”4

Ruth began spring training as a left-handed throwing shortstop who handled all fielding chances “with ease and grace,” an observer noted.5 The observer was also impressed when he saw Ruth fan four batters in three innings in his first pitching appearance. Ruth was noted to have terrific speed, but still needed some work: “Ruth lacks one quality of a successful pitcher: He has never had experience with fast company.”6 But when he made his first pitching start of the spring exhibition season, he looked as though he was learning when he defeated the Phillies.

The next day the Orioles trailed the Phillies, 6-0, in the sixth-inning when Ruth was called in from the bullpen to put out the fire. He quickly ended the inning by whiffing Eddie Matteson and Dode Paskert and held the Phillies scoreless while his teammates chipped away at the lead and won, 7-6.

Six days later, Ruth again proved his abilities when he defeated the Philadelphia Athletics, 6-2. “Ruth, who went the full 9 innings, pitched beautifully,” wrote Jesse Linthicum. “Not at any stage of the contest did he show any signs of nervousness. The Athletics paid him a big compliment by saying he is one of the best youngsters they have seen in a long time.”7

Three days later the A’s got another crack at Ruth, and they were ready. “The Athletics started in on Ruth as though determined to drive the juvenile off the rubber,” opined a Philadelphia sportswriter.8 The first four Philadelphia batters reached base and the A’s went on to win, 12-5. Frank Baker led the A’s hitting attack by going 4-for-5. “Baker hit the ball on the nose each time and the hits shot out to the outfield like bullets,” wrote Linthicum.9

Before one of Baker’s at-bats, Orioles catcher Ben Egan told Ruth about his signal to waste a pitch. When Baker came to the plate, Egan flashed the signal to Ruth, but instead of wasting one, Ruth threw the pitch over the heart of the plate, and Baker sent the ball for a long ride. Egan then went to the mound and asked Ruth why he didn’t obey his signal. “I threw it waste high,” Ruth answered.10

Just three months after making his professional debut with the Baltimore Orioles, Babe Ruth was sold to the Boston Red Sox and reached the major leagues on July 11, 1914. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Not discouraged by the powerful Athletics’ rough treatment, Ruth “tossed like a million dollars” in a win over the Dodgers the following week. “In the first 5 innings, he had the visitors breaking their backs in an effort to reach his benders,” penned a Baltimore sportswriter, “and when he got himself into a hole, he showed he had the necessary backbone to pull himself together.”11 In addition to striking out six, Ruth socked a two-run triple and hit two out of the park during batting practice. “The more I see Ruth the hitter, the more I like him,” Dunn said.12 “When batting, Ruth takes a long lunge at the ball and meets it on the nose,” noted Linthicum. “He holds his bat down at the end and puts all his weight behind the swing.”13

On April 22, Ruth blanked Buffalo in his first International League start, 6-0. He yielded 6 hits and struck out 6 while going 2-for-4 at the plate. He dropped his next game, 2-1. “Ruth pitched an excellent game,” wrote Linthincum, “and should have won, 1-0. An error led to one run and a walk led to another.”14

On May 1, Ruth pitched his second win, in a relief role. With the game tied, 1-1, after nine innings, Ruth entered the game and pitched a scoreless 10th and 11th inning. In the bottom of the 11th, the Orioles had a man on first when Ruth approached the plate for his turn at bat. After taking a ball and a strike, he belted one to the left field scoreboard, far enough to allow the runner to score from first base for a 2-1 win. Ruth won his third game the next day and “again was the hero,” wrote Linthicum. “His sensational work in the box and at bat stood out as the most prominent feature.”15 He struck out seven and hit a two-run triple in an 8-3 win. He upped his record to 4-1 when he hurled 11 innings in a 5-3 win at Buffalo, but then cooled off, dropping his next two decisions.

On May 23, Dunn decided to start Ruth in right field and place him in the leadoff spot. Ruth had held his own as a shortstop in spring training, but Dunn was unsure about using a left-handed shortstop. The experiment was deemed a failure, as Ruth went 0-for 3. The next day Ruth was tagged for seven hits in 3 1/3 innings in a relief role. The humiliation from the first game did not prevent Ruth from coming back in the nightcap. Ruth pitched 11 innings in the nightcap for his fifth win of the season. He closed out the month of May with another win to up his season record to 6-3.

Ruth started June by splitting his first six decisions. On June 20, he didn’t even make it through the second inning. He was removed after yielding back-to-back home runs, one of the two hit by a first baseman named Wally Pipp. On June 23, when Ruth blanked Toronto to win his 10th, Linthicum wrote, “Ruth pitched his most brilliant game. The youngster allowed only 5 scattered hits, 2 of which were the infield variety. He had 8 strikeouts to his credit.”16 Two days later, with the Orioles trailing, 7-0, Ruth was sent in as a relief pitcher. He held the opposition and the Orioles rallied for a 13-8 win.

In his next start, Ruth allowed three runs on three hits in the first inning, but then settled down, allowing six hits in the last eight innings in a 10-5 win, his 12th of the season. On July 4, Ruth yielded two runs in the first inning. “From that point until the 7th, the visitors did not have a chance,” wrote C. Starr Matthews of the Baltimore Sun, “for Ruth twirled like the winner he is.”17 Later in the game, Ruth smacked a RBI double to help his own cause in a 4-3 win, his 13th of the season. On July 6, Ruth won in relief to up his season record to 14-7.

With the season now at its halfway point, the Orioles were in first place and appeared to be heading for the pennant. But Dunn was losing money. Fans were flocking to see the Baltimore Federals, a new major league team. Dunn entertained the thought of moving his franchise to Richmond, Virginia, but that idea was nixed by the International League, leaving him with no choice but to break up his team.

Dunn knew there would be interest for Ruth, so he offered him to his good friend Connie Mack, manager and partial owner of the Athletics. Mack was also feeling the effects of the Federal League. His attendance was down and his players were demanding new contracts mid-season, using the threat of jumping to the Federal League as leverage. “Jack, you have a great young pitcher in Ruth,” Mack told Dunn, “but I can’t give you what he is worth.”18

White Sox ivory hunter George Mills, who spent time scouting Ruth and the Orioles, made a recommendation to his boss Charles Comiskey to pay $60,000 for Ruth and five other Baltimore players. Dunn was thrilled when hearing this, but no action was ever taken. Fortunately for Dunn, another financially stable team was interested.

Boston Red Sox scout Patsy Donovan came to town and stayed a while to get a good look at Ruth. When he reported back to Red Sox owner Joseph Lannin, he highly recommended the young ballplayer. On July 6, while the Red Sox were playing in Washington, Dunn traveled to Washington to meet with Lannin. Three days later, Dunn and Lannin had a long-distance phone conference to finalize the deal. Ruth and two other Orioles were sold to the Red Sox for $25,000. “If I had made the deal in 1913, I would have made twice the amount,” said a disappointed Dunn.19 And thus concluded Babe Ruth’s brief season with the Baltimore Orioles.

GARY A. SARNOFF has been an active SABR member since 1994. A member of SABR’s Bob Davids Chapter, he has contributed to SABR’s Bio and Games Projects, and to the annual National Pastime publication. He is also member of the SABR Negro Leagues Committee and serves as chairman of the Ron Gabriel Committee. In addition, he has authored two baseball books: “The Wrecking Crew of ’33” and “The First Yankees Dynasty.” He currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia.

Notes

1 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Babe Ruth, ‘a natural,’” August 17, 1948, 15.

2 Baltimore Sun, “Cree and Ruth on Job,” March 11, 1914, 5.

3 Baltimore Sun, “Home run by Ruth feature of game,” March 8, 1914,part 2, 1.

4 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Babe Ruth,’ a natural,’” August 17, 1948, 15.

5 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Yanigans show class,” March 14, 1914, 7.

6 Baltimore Sun, “Cree and Ruth on job,” March 11, 1914, 5.

7 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Birds beat Athletics,” March 26, 1914, 5.

8 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Mackies make merry music meeting Ruth,” Sporting Section, 1.

9 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Baker’s batting helps to defeat Dunn’s Orioles,” March 29, 1914, part 2, 1.

10 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Babe Ruth, ‘a natural,’” August 17, 1948, 15.

11 Baltimore Sun, “Ruth beats Dodgers,” April 6, 1914, 8.

12 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Orioles win in ninth,” March 19, 1914, 5.

13 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Baker’s batting helps defeat Dunn’s Orioles,” March 29, 1914, part 2, 1.

14 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Orioles lose both,” April 28, 1914, 7.

15 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Orioles divide doubleheader with Leafs,” May 3, 1914, part 2, 1.

16 Jesse Linthicum, Baltimore Sun, “Ruth blanks Leafs,” June 24, 1914, 5.

17 Starr Matthews, Baltimore Sun, “Birds and Clams split,” July 5, 1914, part 2, 1.

18 Frederick G. Lieb, The Baltimore Orioles, (New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955), 141-42.

19 Starr Matthews, Baltimore Sun, “The rise of Babe Ruth,” July 10, 1914, 5.

Western Maryland has had a long history of organized baseball going back to the late nineteenth century.¹ Noted for its connection to the railroads to the west, and nearby coal fields that dotted the region of Allegany County, the activity of baseball became the outlet for many young men in the region, as town teams and athletic clubs became prevalent during this time period.²

For some, baseball became a way to get out of the coal mines. The most notable was a young man named Robert Moses Groves from Lonaconing.³ Taking advantage of his long frame and blazing fastball, he would go on to win 300 games in the major leagues, and enshrinement into Baseball’s Hall of Fame, as “Lefty” Grove.⁴

The first organized baseball clubs in Cumberland, Maryland date back to 1883, mostly amateur or town teams.⁵  The local coal mines and railroads started to field organized teams in the mid-1890s. In 1906, Cumberland was accepted in the Class D Pennsylvania-Ohio-Maryland League (POM), and fielded a team called the Giants. When the Butler, Pennsylvania club folded, the franchise was moved to nearby Piedmont, West Virginia, but after three weeks, the franchise moved again to Charleroi, Pennsylvania to finish out the season. After finishing the 1906 season, the club was moved to McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Before the start of the 1908 season, the league was disbanded for financial reasons.⁶

The experience spurred interest in professional baseball in the region. In 1910, Cumberland organized a new independent club, the Colts.⁷ Soon other areas, like Piedmont, joined in and played against Cumberland and other local teams in Maryland and West Virginia. After not having grounds to play on in 1912, by 1913 the Cumberland Baseball Club had a “modern baseball park in South Cumberland (built) on the Walsh property, between the N. & G. Taylor Company’s tin mill and the Weber lumber yard.”⁸

In 1914, a local businessman, Colonel Nelson W. Russler, a big baseball enthusiast, became the club’s business manager.⁹ With his savvy business sense and knack of signing quality players, Russler was influential with the establishment of the amateur Georges Creek League in 1914.¹⁰ Based primarily in Allegany County, Maryland, the league added teams including Frostburg, Lonaconing, Midland, and the Tri-Towns of Piedmont/Westernport/Luke.

The Georges Creek League saw much success in 1914 and 1915, and the Russler-led Colts became local celebrities at South End Park, with hometown players such as Hugh Markwood, John Marean, George “Sonny” Geatz, Clarence Schafer, and the Lippold brothers, Frank and Charles.¹¹

When the Class D Blue Ridge League was formed in 1915, including a team in Russler’s hometown of Martinsburg, he took great interest in trying to get Cumberland admitted into the league.

However, due to travel distance from the Pennsylvania clubs in the circuit, and Sunday baseball, which was allowed in Allegany County at the time, but not in any of the current league towns, their bid went for naught.¹²

Despite the setback, Russler was determined to get Cumberland a professional baseball club in 1916. With the help of Charles Boyer, the Blue Ridge League president, Russler spearheaded a group of businessmen to garner interest in bringing pro ball to the region. Soon the Piedmont club and a newly organized team in Frostburg, Maryland applied. The minimum number of clubs to be considered was four clubs, so Russler extended invitations out to towns in Pennsylvania and Western Maryland, but with no success. Midland from the Georges Creek League was too small to draw from, but the businessmen from nearby Lonaconing gathered funds to fix up their ballfield to become the fourth club of the newly minted Class D Potomac League, calling their club the Giants.¹³

Despite the challenges to field four financially solvent teams, and a world war a continent away, Russler and Cumberland attorney Fuller Barnard Jr. — who was elected the league’s president¹⁴ — got the groundwork started to organize the Potomac League in February 1916. With much fanfare and Cumberland as its base of operations, Frostburg, Lonaconing, and Piedmont officially joined, starting play on May 3.¹⁵

The Colts had a rocky start before the season began, as Russler’s first pick as manager, Herbert Lewis, didn’t pass muster, and was released two weeks before the season began.¹⁶ Colonel Russler quickly found a replacement in Harry Deal of Bedford, Pennsylvania, and the Colts under his guidance quickly took shape at South End Park.¹⁷

Russler kept a mainstay of Colts from the Georges Creek League club, with Geatz at third base; Schafer, John Marean, and newcomer Mike Koroly in the outfield; Frank Lippold behind the plate and his brother, Charley Lippold at second base; and pitcher Jonny Stafford on the mound. Adding pitchers Eddie Price, Johnny East, and Merle Tannehill, Deal at first base, and 18-year old local boy named George “Brindle” Long at shortstop, Russler’s club was ready for Opening Day.¹⁸

However, after a nine-game losing streak, and never satisfied, Russler had a revolving door of players throughout the season, until he found a lineup he was satisfied with. Among the players he was able to add to the Colts roster were pitchers Charles Dye of nearby Barton, Maryland, John “Lefty” Fike, and Virginia native Kirk Heatwole. Dye started the season with Toronto of the International League, but a hand injury led to him requesting his release, and he soon signed with the Colts.¹⁹ Heatwole, a rangy southpaw from the Charlottesville, Virginia area, combined with Dye to give the Colts a competitive boost.²⁰ Only Geatz, Schafer, and Marean both began and finished the season on the Colts roster.

The Lonaconing Giants featured a local left-handed pitcher named Frank “War Horse” Muster. Muster broke most of the pitching records in the Georges Creek League in 1915,²¹ and led the Giants contingent, which featured popular minor league veterans Roy “Shotgun” Keener and Joe Phillips, and newcomers Joe (Serafin) Cobb and Kenny (Mike) Knode, who both reached the major leagues.^{22 23}

James McGuire started the season as the Lonaconing manager and, after losing the first five games, led the Giants to the best record, until he suddenly resigned on June 10th due to conflicts at his regular job.²⁴ Keener, a West Virginia native, was soon tapped to replace McGuire, and helmed the Giants until they officially disbanded on July 23rd for financial reasons.²⁵

Other notable Giants players were infielders Owen Flynn and John Nagle, and a local boy, pitcher John “Stub” Brown. The Lonaconing club was one of the best clubs in the league, vying for the lead with rival Frostburg Demons. Among the young Lonaconing fans was a promising 14-year old, who idolized Muster.²⁶ They knew him as Bobby, a.k.a. the aforementioned Robert M. “Lefty” Groves.

Frostburg’s club featured one of the league’s better pitchers, with Somerset, Pennsylvania native R. S. “John” Baylor,²⁷ and the controversial Bill Stair leading the pitching corps. Stair had the league’s best win percentage, but was run out of Frostburg after he was arrested and found guilty of chasing after and punching a fan on the street. That fan, a respected local businessman, did not talk kindly about the feisty Demon pitcher.²⁸ Pat Brophy managed the Demons, leading his club through the loss of one of their star pitchers to still finish with the best overall record when the league disbanded on August 18.²⁹

Many of the players who were in the league came from the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. region. One was Frostburg outfielder John Salb. Salb, a Washington, DC, native, had played previously for the Midland club in the old Georges Creek League from 1911 through 1915, and married his manager’s daughter, Dorothy Dillon.³⁰ The Demons also featured infielders John “Shuck” Doyle and Fay Anderson, and catcher John “Sammy” Morgan.

The Piedmont club was known as the Drybugs, and though its offices were on the West Virginia side of the Potomac River in Tri-Towns section of Luke, they played their games on a little island on the Maryland side of the river, near Westernport, called Potomac Park.³¹ The Drybugs were managed by Baltimore native Owen Harris,³² and featured the league’s best pitcher, Ben Schaufele, another Baltimore native, who won 14 games.³³ The nucleus of the Drybugs roster was from the Baltimore area, including shortstop Arthur T. Smith, outfielders Frederick “Jake” Zinnell, G. C. Plaxico, and Porter Wamsley, catcher Leroy Bruff, and pitchers Tommy Verecker and E.L. Morseberger. The only homegrown regular player from the Piedmont/Westernport area on the Drybugs roster throughout the season was outfielder Don Whitworth.³⁴

Hebron, Maryland native Samuel Freeny attended St. Johns College while playing professional baseball for several teams in the Blue Ridge League. Upon graduating in 1917, he joined the Marines. During World War II he was taken prisoner by the Japanese and was beheaded in the Philippines. (MARK ZEIGLER)

The league, however, never prospered, with Cumberland the only club able to come close to turning a profit. Lonaconing, despite having the best record, was forced to disband on July 23rd, leaving the league with only three clubs.³⁵ Despite rearranging the league schedule, the Frostburg club suffered the same fate as Lonaconing, and by August 18th had also disbanded, leaving only two clubs standing, forcing the league to disband for good.³⁶

The Cumberland Colts and Piedmont Drybugs continued to field their clubs and played an independent schedule.³⁷ On September 24th, the Drybugs played an exhibition game at Potomac Park against the National League’s Cincinnati Reds, whose roster included Piedmont resident Bill “Baldy” Louden. The game featured an appearance by future Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson, which drew the largest crowd to date by the Piedmont club.³⁸

In keeping his Cumberland club together through mid-September by playing an independent schedule, Russler found the club losing money for the first time, some in part from the extra salaries he paid to bring in the best players from the Lonaconing club after they disbanded in July, which included Keener, Phillips, Knode, and Cobb.³⁹ This dismayed the club’s stockholders, and by the end of the season, all but two sold out their shares of the club, leaving Russler, and George E. Jordan as sole owners.⁴⁰

Cumberland, still itching to return to professional baseball, again applied for entry into the Class D Blue Ridge League for the 1917 season.⁴¹ Three towns vied for the struggling Gettysburg, Pennsylvania franchise, but the league decided to keep the franchise in Gettysburg as is.⁴²

Despite Cumberland’s application being denied again, Russler’s patience would soon pay off, as the Chambersburg, Pennsylvania franchise, the defending league champions, failed to pay their franchise fee by their league deadline of May 30th. President James Vincent Jamison Jr. transferred the Chambersburg franchise to Cumberland.⁴³ Russler and the Colts were back in business, and they quickly got South End Park ready for play. Professional baseball was back in business in Cumberland.

After completing the 1917 schedule, Cumberland prepared for the 1918 season, but by that time, World War I had entered into American homes, and interest and finances dwindled in many towns in the region. Most leagues disbanded, but thanks to Russler’s persistence, the Blue Ridge League was able to field four clubs to start the season as the only Class D club to play that year.⁴⁴ However, the Frederick club bowed out a week before the season was to begin,⁴⁵ threatening to force the league to disband, until the Piedmont Drybugs came forward and quickly fielded a team as the fourth club.⁴⁶ Piedmont tried to bring in hometown former major league infielder Bill Louden to manage, but he was still under contract with the Saint Paul, Minnesota ball club. Instead they hired their shortstop from the 1916 team, Arthur T. “Shorty” Smith, as manager.⁴⁷ Smith, a Baltimore native, recruited many players from the Charm City region, including a former Drybugs teammate, Ben Schafeule.⁴⁸

Like Piedmont’s first entry into professional baseball in 1906, their stay in the Blue Ridge League only lasted three weeks in 1918, as the league disbanded on June 16th due to the war effort and lack of interest and finances among the other clubs.⁴⁹ Neither Cumberland nor Piedmont ever played in the Blue Ridge League again, though Cumberland did field a Class C Mid-Atlantic League club from 1925 to 1932.⁵⁰

A native of Boonsboro, Maryland, MARK ZEIGLER has researched minor league baseball since 1996. A graduate of Salisbury University in Maryland, Mark spent 20 years in professional baseball with the Philadelphia Phillies, Baltimore Orioles and Texas Rangers minor league affiliates, primarily with the Orioles, Advanced A, Carolina League affiliate, Frederick Keys. He has extensively researched the early years of the Class D, Blue Ridge League, and his research can be found on his website at www.blueridgeleague.org. More recently, he has been researching the Class D, Potomac League, which played less than one full season in 1916. Mark is a Realtor in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, and lives with wife, Margaret, and his two children, Gracie and Jacob, in Kearneysville.

TOP PLAYERS FROM THE 1916 CLASS D POTOMAC LEAGUE

• BA: Joe Phillips, Lonaconing/Cumberland, .367                            
• R: Roy Keener, Lonaconing/Cumberland, 51                               
• H: Roy Keener, Lonaconing/Cumberland, 82                               
• HR: Joe Cobb, Lonaconing/Cumberland, 6                                 
• SB: Jake Zinnell, Piedmont, 25                               
• Games Played: Joe Phillips, Lonaconing/Cumberland, 52                               
• ERA: Ben Schaufele, Piedmont, 1.66
• Games Pitched: Ben Schaufele, Piedmont, 29
• W: Ben Schaufele, Piedmont, 14
• IP: R.S. “John” Baylor, Frostburg, 207
• K: R.S. “John” Baylor, Frostburg, 114
• Win Pct.: Bill Stair, Frostburg (8-1), .889
• Fielding Pct.: Owen Harris, Piedmont, .989                            
• PO: Harry Deal, Cumberland, 578
• A: Arthur T. Smith, Piedmont, 153                             
• E: Arthur T. Smith, Piedmont, 30
• Total Chances: Harry Deal, Cumberland, 616

Sources: Lloyd Johnson and Miles Wolff, The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball 2nd edition,, Baseball America, Inc., p. 207; Fielding Statistics from “Final Fielding Leaders,” The Baltimore Sun, August 20, 1916, p. 26; additional league leaders, including pitching statistics from author’s extensive research on the 1916 Class D Potomac League.

1916 CLASS D, POTOMAC LEAGUE STANDOUTS

Honorable Mention: Bill Stair, Frostburg, P; Sammy Freeney, Frostburg, 1B; John Morgan, Frostburg, C; John Brown, P, Lonaconing/Frostburg; Tommy Vereker, Piedmont, P; Harry Deal, Cumberland, 1B; Charles Dye, Cumberland, P; John Herbert, Frostburg, P; Jake Zinnell, Piedmont, OF; Porter Wamsley, Piedmont, OF; Clarence Schafer, Cumberland, OF; and Mike Boyle, Frostburg, SS.

Notes

1. “Cumberland’s Proposed Army Reunion,” The Baltimore Sun, June 13, 1884, 1. “Former Cumberland Star Visits Old Battlefield,” The Baltimore Sun, September 12, 1915, 31.
2. Jim Kaplan, Lefty Grove: American Original, Society of American Baseball Research, 2000, 44.
3. Kaplan, 30, 39.
4. Kaplan, 275.
5. The Baltimore Sun, August 25, 1883, 4.
6. Pennsylvania-Ohio-Maryland League, Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed January 18, 2020. https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Pennsylvania-Ohio-Maryland_League
7. “Won 1910 Steinweg Cup,” Cumberland News, April 26, 1956
8. “Will Build New Ball Park,” The Washington Post, March 2, 1913, 2.
9. “Colonel Russler Will Lead Cumberland Ball Team,” The Baltimore Sun, January 14, 1914, 9.
10. V. Burns, “Sports Slants: Colts Birthplace, et al…,” The Cumberland News, September 12, 1967, 10.
11. “The Aces of 40 Years Ago,” The Cumberland News, May 12, 1955, 47.
12. Public Opinion, January 13, 1916, 1.
13. “Organize Baby Circuit at Cumberland Meeting,” The (Hanover) Evening Sun, February 24, 1916, 3.
14. “Organize Baby Circuit at Cumberland Meeting.”
15. “Potomac League Season Opens Tomorrow with Parade and Speeches,” Cumberland Evening Times, May 2, 1916, 8.
16. “Manager Lewis Given His Release – Yannigans Trims Regulars 2 to 1,” Cumberland Evening Times, April 18, 1916, 6.
17. “Deal Arrives for Practice,” Cumberland Evening Times, April 25, 1916, 10.
18. “Mayor Koon to Toss Out First Ball at Opener,” Cumberland Evening Times, May 2, 1916, 8.
19. “Dye Signs with Russler’s Colts,” Cumberland Evening Times, June 27, 1916, 5.
20. “Heatwole Gets a Job,” The Baltimore Sun, May 9, 1916, 10.
21. “Frank Muster, Now 90, to be Honored June 16,” Cumberland News, June 6, 1972, 12.
22. “Joe Cobb, Minor League and Major League Statistics,” Baseball-Reference.com, https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=cobb–005jos

23. “Mike Knode, Minor League and Major League Statistics,” Baseball-Reference.com, https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/k/knodemi01.shtml

24. “Jim M’Guire Resigns…,” The Baltimore Sun, June 18, 1916, 29.
25. “Lonaconing Quits,” The (Frederick) News, July 22, 1916, 3.
26. Suter Kegg, “Tapping The Sports Keg,” Cumberland Evening Times, January 12, 1960, 12.
27. “Baylor Throws Colts into White Kalsomine,” Cumberland Evening Times, May 29, 1916, 6.
28. “Bill Stair Found Guilty of Assault,” Cumberland Evening Times, June 27, 1916, 5.
29. Lloyd Johnson and Miles Wolff, The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball 2^nd edition, Baseball America, Inc., 2007, 207.
30. “J. B. Salb Weds Miss Dillon, of Frostburg,” The Washington Times, July 26, 1911, 12.
31. Robert P. Savitt, The Blue Ridge League, Arcadia Publishing, 2011, 37
32. “Cumberland President is Busy Signing Players,” The Baltimore Sun, March 13, 1916, 10.
33. “Piedmont Signs Schaufele,” The Baltimore Sun, March 25, 1916, 11.
34. Donald P. Whitworth’s World War I Draft Registration Card, 1917.
35. “Lonaconing Quits, League Continues,” Cumberland Evening Times, July 24, 1916, 8.
36. “Potomac League Will Not Finish Season’s Second Half,” Cumberland Evening Times, August 14, 1916, 9.
37. “Two Teams to Stick: Cumberland and Piedmont of the late Potomac League to Play Independent Ball,” The Baltimore Sun, August 20, 1916, 26.
38. “When the Reds Play Piedmont,” Cumberland Evening Times, September 19, 1918, 5.
39. “More Chances to Sell Ball Club: Three Towns are now after berths in the Blue Ridge League,” The Gettysburg Times, December 20, 1916, 1.
40. “Blue Ridge League Spent About $70,000 in Season,” The Baltimore Sun, December 18, 1916, 8.
41. “Blue Ridge League Spent About $70,000 in Season.”
42. “More Chances…”
43. “Franchise is Switched: Cumberland Gets Chambersburg’s Berth in Blue Ridge,” The Baltimore Sun, July 1, 1917, 25.
44. Lloyd Johnson and Miles Wolff, The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball 1^st edition, Baseball America, Inc., 1993, 148.
45. “League Sure to Continue, Says Jamison,” The Baltimore Sun, May 12, 1918, 24.
46. “Opening of Blue Ridge League Season Postponed Four Days,” Cumberland Evening Times, May 15, 1918, 8.
47. “Must Take a Back Seat: Bill Louden Cannot Manage Piedmont Unless He is Released,” The Baltimore Sun, May 26, 1918, 24.
48. “Piedmont Pilot in Balto. After Players: Manager Smith Endeavoring to Land Pitcher Schaufele and Klingenhoffer,” Cumberland Evening Times, May 24, 1918, 5.
49. “Blue Ridge League Closes Season Sunday,” Cumberland Evening Times, June 15, 1918, 4.
50. Johnson and Wolff, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 176, 178, 180.

In 1920, the Baltimore Orioles were champions of the International League (IL) for the second straight year. Baltimore would win seven consecutive pennants (1919–25), and six of the championship teams are ranked in the top 20 of the 100 best minor league teams of the twentieth century by Bill Weiss and Marshall Wright.1 (See sidebar 1 below.)

Owner Jack Dunn had survived the invasion of the Federal League by selling off some of his players and hightailing it to Richmond, VA, then returning to Baltimore in 1916. He would create a minor-league dynasty, locking up his best players for years during a time when the IL was exempt from the major league draft. The man who had sold Babe Ruth to the Red Sox for a bargain price had learned his lesson, placing high price tags on players desired by big-league clubs. Dunn and 11 of his players are in the International League Hall of Fame. Only one player from the dynasty years made it to Cooperstown, and there should have been more. (See sidebar 2). This article will discuss these eleven players and the championship seasons of which they were a part.

Jack Bentley joined the Washington Nationals (nicknamed the Senators) at the end of 1913 and, in parts of four seasons, compiled a 6–9 record in 39 games as a pitcher. He was dispatched to Minneapolis of the American Association and, on August 18, 1916, was sent to Baltimore for the balance of the season. He was formally traded by Washington to Baltimore in early 1917 and was the cornerstone as Dunn rebuilt the Orioles.

Obtained by Dunn along with Bentley was Turner Barber, who was dealt to the Cubs in exchange for outfielder Merwin Jacobson, who starred with Baltimore from 1919 through 1924. Although his services had been secured prior to the 1918 season, Jacobson spent that year in Washington, DC, doing war-related work.

Bentley also came into his own as a hitter in 1916, and in 1917, batting .343. Suffering from arm trouble, he only appeared in one game as a pitcher. Baltimore improved to 88-61, finishing in third place, 2.5 games behind the league leaders.

Baltimore almost lost Bentley after the 1917 season. He was drafted by the Red Sox but entered the Army, serving with distinction in World War I. As 1919 began, he was still in France, and the Red Sox still had the rights to his services. Boston didn’t need Bentley at first base, as they had Stuffy McInnis. As Boston owner Harry Frazee hadn’t paid the $2,500 draft price for Bentley by February 1, Bentley returned to Baltimore.

In the abbreviated 1918 season, Baltimore continued to build. Otis Lawry, who had been obtained from the Athletics in a seven-player deal after the 1917 season, came into his own, batting .317. He played with the Orioles until midway through the 1924 season.

Eighteen-year-old Max Bishop was installed at third base in 1918. With Bentley still in Europe at the start of the 1919 season, Bishop played first base. His average through the season’s first eight games stood at .652 with seven extra-base hits.. Once Bentley returned, Bishop was moved to second base, and it was at that position that he would remain for the balance of his professional career.

New faces were on the left side of the infield in 1919. The shortstop was Joe Boley, who played in the low minors in 1916 and 1917 and did not play in organized baseball in 1918. He had taken a job at a plant with work related to the war effort in 1917, and he played on the plant’s semi-pro team in 1917 and 1918. One of his teammates in 1917 had been Bishop. Bishop suggested that Dunn sign Boley and the shortstop joined the Orioles in 1919.2

Fritz Maisel was popular with Baltimore when he played with them from 1911 through mid-1913. He was traded to the Yankees and was with them through 1917. He spent 1918 with the St. Louis Browns. His acquisition by Dunn as the team’s third baseman put another stone in place.3

Baltimore opened at home against Rochester on April 30, 1919, with Rube Parnham pitching. The 25-year-old had gone 38-19 with Baltimore over the prior two seasons, but until January 16, 1918, was property of the Philadelphia Athletics. He had appeared briefly, in a total of six games, with Philadelphia in 1916 and 1917. Parnham was Baltimore’s top pitcher in 1919, going 28-12.

Bentley returned to Baltimore on June 21, 1919. On his first day in the lineup, he started the second game of a doubleheader against Rochester and went 3-for-5 with a sixth-inning homer.4

Baltimore won the IL pennant by eight games. After the season, Baltimore did not participate in the Junior World Series, which was contested that year between the champions of the American Association and the Pacific Coast League.

Late in 1919, Dunn ensured the future success of the team by signing his stars to two-year contracts. He demanded top money for his players, including a man who came on board during the 1920 season: Robert Moses “Lefty” Grove. Only 20 years old, Grove got his professional start in 1920 with Martinsburg, West Virginia in the Class D Blue Ridge League. His 1.68 ERA and 60 strikeouts in 59 innings aroused the interest of Dunn, who secured Grove’s services.

Grove joined Baltimore in late June and won his first two outings. In his first appearance, on July 1, he defeated Jersey City 9-3 in the second game of a doubleheader giving the Orioles a one and a half game lead in the league standings. He allowed five hits in the abbreviated seven-inning contest. Three days later, he defeated Reading, 8-1. He scattered seven hits, struck out eight, and, in the fourth inning, struck out the side.5

Another new arm in 1920 was that of Jack Ogden. Ogden was obtained from Rochester, where he had gone 10-13 in 1919. With Baltimore, he shined, and Dunn held on to him through 1927. In six of eight seasons, he won more than 20 games, and his record for the eight seasons was 191-80.

The 1920 Orioles still had Bentley, and he returned to mound duty, going 16-3 with a league leading 2.10 ERA. He also swung a potent bat with 71 extra-base hits, 20 of which were homers, to go along with a .371 batting average. His 161 RBIs led the league.

Baltimore won its last 25 games to set an IL record. Their season’s record of 110-43 barely eclipsed Toronto’s 108-46 mark. In the best-of-nine JWS, Baltimore defeated American Association champion St. Paul in six games for the first of three JWS titles. Bentley’s two homers won Game One, 5-3. He let his arm do the work in Game Three, winning 9-2 to put the Birds within two games of the series win.6 After the Saints broke into the win column in Game Four, the teams traveled to Minnesota. Bentley was back on the mound, winning 6-5 in Game Five, a triumph marred by fan hostility to umpire Otis H. Stocksdale for calling Lawry, who had bunted, safe at first in an inning where the Orioles scored the game’s decisive run. In the same inning, St. Paul pitcher Dan Griner was accused of throwing a shine ball, and a further ruckus ensued.7 The Orioles clinched the series in Game Six. Ogden pitched a 1-0 shutout and Boley’s home run was the only offensive support needed.

Babe Ruth in a borrowed New York Giants uniform, with his former owner Jack Dunn (and Giants player Jack Bentley), before the October 3, 1923, exhibition game between the Giants and the Dunn’s International League Orioles. Ruth, who was a star with the Yankees by then, was enticed to play to be a gate draw. The game’s proceeds went to fundraising for former Giants owner John B. Day and former manager Jim Mutrie. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

In 1921, Dunn added pitcher Tommy Thomas. Thomas racked up 105 wins in five seasons with the Orioles before being traded to the White Sox for Maurice Archdeacon late in the 1925 season. The deal was announced on September 12, 1925, and Thomas, after spending the balance of the season with Baltimore, joined Chicago for the 1926 season.8

Bentley batted .412 with 24 home runs and 120 RBI. His batting average is the IL record. He set a league record of 246 hits that still stands and led in doubles (47), total bases (397) and slugging average (.665). The 24 homers were a league record at the time. On the mound, Bentley was 12-1 with a 2.35 ERA. Being left-handed and with these statistics, it is not surprising that he was starting to be called “The Babe Ruth of the Minors.”9

Baltimore lost the 1921 JWS to Louisville in eight games.

The 1922 Orioles had a phenomenal record (115-52) thanks in large part to pitchers who could hit. In addition to Bentley (13-2; .351 batting average and 22 homers), the staff included Parnham (16-10; .315 batting average and six homers), Ogden (24-10; two homers), Thomas (18-9; two homers), and Harry Frank (22-9; one homer).

Grove went 18-8 with a pair of doubles amongst his 13 hits. He remained in Baltimore for 1923 and 1924, compiling a combined record of 53-16. He made his major-league debut in 1925 with the Philadelphia Athletics, and hung around for 17 Hall-of-Fame seasons, compiling a 300-141 record for the A’s and the Boston Red Sox.

Bentley hit at least 20 homers in each season from 1920 through 1922. What did he do as a pitcher? A none-too-shabby 41-6. It was his pitching that attracted John McGraw of the Giants who obtained Bentley for $72,500. Bentley was used mostly as a pitcher by the Giants going 40-22 from 1923 through 1925, but did manage to bat .329 with four homers, and went 5-for-12 (.417) in the 1923 and 1924 World Series.10 In 1923, his .412 batting average (28-for-68) set the one-season mark for hitting by National League pitchers. His overall average that year was .427 as he pinch-hit on 22 occasions, going 10-for-21 with a walk.

The Orioles returned to the Junior World Series in 1922, defeating St. Paul, five games to two.

The 1923 Orioles went 111-53 and won the IL pennant by 11 games. The core of the team — Bishop, Boley, Jacobson, Lawry, and Maisel — was still around, and Bishop led the league in homers with 22. In 1921, Dunn had signed 19-year-old Dick Porter, whom he kept locked up through 1928. Porter batted .316 in 1923. It was the first of six consecutive seasons in which he batted at least .316.

Jimmy Walsh was the new first baseman in 1923 and batted .333. He was a 35-year-old veteran who had parts of six seasons in the majors, and had joined Baltimore in 1922, batting .327. It was his second go-around with Baltimore. He had been with the team from 1910 through 1912.

Grove was 27-10 with a league leading 330 strikeouts. Parnham, who had rejoined the team in 1922, was 33-7 in his last great season. In the JWS, Baltimore lost to Kansas City in nine games.

In 1924, Baltimore went 117-48 and finished 19 games ahead of Toronto. Grove’s pitching (26-6) and Porter’s batting (.363) led the league. The key acquisition that season was George Earnshaw. Dunn held on to Earnshaw until 1928, when the Athletics met Dunn’s price of a reported $80,000. Baltimore lost to St. Paul in a JWS that took 10 games to complete, there being one tie.

In 1925, three pitchers won at least 28 games. The team’s leader in wins was Thomas with 32. Earnshaw, in his first full season, won 29. Ogden won 28. Baltimore’s 188 homers were tops in the league. In the JWS, Baltimore defeated Louisville in eight games.

The dynasty would yield ten inductees to the International League Hall of Fame in a steady stream of inductions between 1948 and 1963, with an eleventh, Grove, added in 2008 (after his induction to Cooperstown). Dunn’s Orioles would never again have the glory of those seven great seasons.

ALAN COHEN has been a SABR member since 2010. He serves as Vice President-Treasurer of the Connecticut Smoky Joe Wood Chapter and is datacaster (MiLB First Pitch stringer) for the Hartford Yard Goats, the Double-A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies. His biographies, game stories and essays have appeared in more than 40 SABR publications. Since his first Baseball Research Journal article appeared in 2013, Alan has continued to expand his research into the Hearst Sandlot Classic (1946-1965) from which 88 players advanced to the major leagues. He has four children and eight grandchildren and resides in Connecticut with wife, Frances, their cats Morty, Ava, and Zoe, and their dog, Buddy.

SIDEBAR 1

Orioles’ Place on All Time Minor League Team Ranking

Source: Bill Weiss and Marshall Wright, The 100 Best Minor League Teams of the 20th Century

SIDEBAR 2

Orioles Inductees to the International League Hall of Fame

*Also inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

Sources

In addition to Baseball-Reference.com and the sources cited in the notes, the author used:

“Bentley Goes to Red Sox: World Champions Grab Oriole First Sacker in Draft,” Baltimore Sun, September 21, 1917, 9.

“Orioles of Old Could Probably Whip Big League Teams Today,” Salisbury Times, April 17, 1953, 12.

Foreman, Charles J. “Orioles Mark Time Waiting for Saints,” The Sporting News, September 30, 1920, 3.

Notes

1 Bill Weiss and Marshall Wright, The 100 Best Minor League Teams of the 20th Century (Parker, Colorado, Outskirts Press, 2006).

2 Darrell Hanson, “Joe Boley,” SABR BioProject.

3 “Fritz Maisel an Oriole,” Baltimore Sun, March 30, 1919, 9.

4 “Jack Bentley Rounds Out Orioles’ Infield for Dash to the Pennant,” Baltimore Evening Sun, June 23, 1919, 11.

5 “Slugging Miners are Meek Before Lefty Groves: Wins His Second Game for Orioles,” Baltimore American, July 5, 1920, 4.

6 The Sporting News, October 14, 1920, 8.

7 Earl Arnold, “Wrangling and Horseplay Mark Orioles Fourth Win Over Saints, 6-5,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, October 14, 1920, 24.

8 “White Sox to Get Tommy Thomas from Orioles,” Evening Sun (Baltimore, Maryland), September 12, 1925: 12.

9 Bill Weiss and Marshall Wright, The 100 Best Minor League Teams of the 20th Century, (Parker, Colorado, Outskirts Press, 2006).

10 Nelson “Chip” Greene, “Jack Bentley,” SABR BioProject.

It has been noted that history is cyclical, and there is nothing new under the sun. Baseball’s relationship with the International Olympic Committee is one example of beatitude realizing its fruition. Baseball was to be a medal sport for the first time at the canceled 1940 Tokyo Olympics.1 And now some 80 years later at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics baseball was to return, only to be postponed. The tumultuous road that baseball has taken to medal sport status traces its roots to 1936 and involves Baltimore and her most famous baseball son, George Herman Ruth.

At the XIth Summer Olympiad in Berlin, on August 12, 1936, at 8:00 PM, 21 ballplayers were introduced to the largest crowd to see a baseball game in the twentieth century.2 One by one, each player jogged from the opposite end of the stands to the center of the huge stadium with a spotlight illuminating them in the increasing darkness. This would be the first night game for these players.3 Adding to the drama, each ballplayer was ushered in with music played by the stadium band, one of earliest examples of ‘“walk-up music.”4 While both teams wore the same elegant white flannels with “US” on the front and a red-white-and-blue Olympic logo shield on the left sleeve, they were distinguished by their caps and socks. This game would be between “Red Stockings” and the “Blues.” The team gathered at the center of the Olympic field and gave an Olympic salute.5

Baseball was one of two sports officially classified as “Special Demonstrations” outside the official Olympic medal winning competitions in 1936. The uncharted path baseball took to get on that field was led by Les Mann, the controversial former player and secretary-treasurer of the American Baseball Congress and the Olympic Baseball Committee. In December 1935, the question of whether the United States would attend the Winter and Summer games held in Germany in 1936 was addressed. In a very hotly contested and divided convention, the US decided not to boycott. But on December 5, the Japanese Olympic baseball authorities decided not to send an Olympic baseball team, claiming it was too expensive to send a team overseas.6 The Japanese did allow one official, “Frank” Matsumato from Meiji University, to travel to Berlin, where he served as an umpire.7 In response, MLB announced at the 1935 Winter Meetings that no financial support would be given and international baseball barnstorming to Japan and other countries was banned.8

The issue of Japan’s withdrawal was likely national pride and not money.9 In the winter of 1935, the Wheaties All Americans — under the leadership of Mann Herb Hunter and picked by Olympic Chairman Avery Brundage, and under partial sponsorship by and Louisville Slugger and chaperoned by Frank Bradsby 10. This college aged teamplayed 15 games against Japanese collegiate teams, beating them regularly.11 In front of 60,000 fans, they beat Waseda University, the Big Six Champion, 6-0. Yet the games were spirited and competitive. Fred Heringer, a Stanford pitcher and member of both the 1935 Wheaties and the 1936 Olympic team, noted in a 1937 interview that the Japanese players he faced were “tops in baseball, and will give anyone a run for his money.”12

While Japanese amateur baseball supposedly did not have the funds to send a team to Berlin, monies were available for a college ball team to barnstorm across the US. From May 15 to July 1, Waseda University played 22 games, going 15-7 against college-age competition. Their coast-to-coast journey started at Stanford University (two games) and included stops at the University of Chicago (two games), Ann Arbor (one inning before the rains came), Boston, a return to Chicago, and finally Seattle and Oakland.13 Coincidentally, the Japanese departure date was the same as the opening of the US Olympic trials.

The highlight of their barnstorming was two shutouts: Harvard (5-0) and Yale (6-0). The Yale game on June 8, 1936, made international headlines for the two-walk, 12-strikeout no-hitter by Waseda pitcher Shozo Wakahara.14

Meanwhile, the US Olympic Baseball leadership was selecting amateur players, attempting to find a capable opponent, and were forced to be independent and raise their own funds without support from MLB. This team needed a hero.

On February 9 and 10, 1936, newspapers around the country announced that the US Olympic Baseball team would be escorted to Berlin by baseball’s greatest hero of all: The Sultan of Swat, the Bambino, Babe Ruth. Ruth was given two new nicknames: Commander in Chief of the Olympic Baseball Committee and “commandant of the United States amateur baseball delegation.”15

After rejecting an offer from Larry McPhail to play for the Reds, Ruth was quoted as saying,“I’m taking a lot of interest in this Olympics baseball program.”16 The Sporting News of April 9, 1936, featured a photo of Ruth shaking Mann’s hand.

Baltimore was chosen as the site for the trials partly due to Charm City’s capable amateur baseball commissioner, Paul E. Burke, who was the also Maryland state representative to the American Baseball Congress. On March 14, 1936, Mayor Howard W. Jackson made public the letter of invitation to Mann and the American Baseball Congress stating that Baltimore wanted to host the trials. And two weeks later, on March 29, The Baltimore Sun ran the following headline: “Babe Ruth Promises To Attend.”

Tryouts were held at Gibbons Field on the campus of Mount St. Joseph. As an added benefit for the area, one or two of Baltimore’s best amateurs would be selected to the team. The plan included tickets to a Washington Nationals game against the Yankees on July 5 and then the use of Griffith Stadium for a fundraiser.17

Mount St. Joseph, run by the Xavierian Brothers of St. Mary’s Industrial School — Ruth’s alma mater, was no accidental choice. This high school had an established baseball development heritage, sending numerous students to professional baseball.18 Having empty summer dorms and a large gym and locker room, it was an ideal campus for the players.19 They were making history, becoming Olympic baseball’s first Team USA.20

An estimated 800 prospective ballplayers sent applications to Mann, from which about an reported to 150 wound up on Gibbons Field.21 While the trials were labeled free for all, it cost each participant a $60 admission fee. No doubt this substantial amount limited the number of attendees. Mann would later state that the fee would be refunded if a player did not make the team.22 By Sunday July 5, players from all corners of the country had arrived and were competing for spots on the team.23

Baltimore had not been the first or even the second choice for the tryouts. In the summer of 1935, the Olympic baseball committee had called for 12 regional tournaments of approved amateur teams competing to determine a national champion along with selecting a tournament all-star team.24 After the Japanese withdrawal, an “East vs West” set of teams was proposed: Well-respected Stanford Coach Harry Wolter was to lead a West team versus an East team from the Penn Athletic Club, led by George Lang and former A’s catcher Ira Thomas.25 These earlier plans did not pan out, but would shape the tryouts in Baltimore: some of the twenty slots on the team were reserved for Penn AC ballplayers.

Three games were scheduled, two in Charm City and one at Griffith Stadium, intended to showcase the talent and serve as fundraisers for the overseas trip.26 The two Baltimore games would feature the local sandlotters. The first, the Police Department game, was a fundraising disaster, generating a net profit of just of seven dollars — significantly short of the $500 required for each self-funded or community-funded player to attend the Olympics!27 In response, Burke called for an emergency meeting of the Maryland Amateur Athletic Association to address the financial shortfall. After much deliberation, they dropped the plan to send any of Baltimore’s best sandlotters to the Olympics. “Apathy of Fans Cited in Abandoning Plans” read the headline in the Evening Sun on the night of July 9.

A major reason for such apathy can be attributed to Baltimore’s favorite son. Ruth did not attend the tryouts, and after mid-April 1936, he went silent on going to Berlin and with his public support of US Olympic baseball. He was encouraged to resign his position of commandant of Olympic baseball, though by whom remains unknown.28

Yet the retired Ruth was still making headlines. During the two weeks of the Baltimore tryouts, the Bambino was in Canada, on a golf and fishing vacation with wife Claire, daughter Dorothy, and friends.29 News reports throughout Canada and the US documented his kindness, accessibility, and larger-than-life prowess.30 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that the Babe’s fishing was a Ruthian event, for on the St. Mary’s River he caught 21 salmon.31 By July 9, Ruth was tracked down in Digby, Nova Scotia, coming off a round of golf at the New Pines Hotel course where he denied the Cleveland Indians had offered him a job as manager.32 The Babe’s Nova Scotia legacy lives on to this day as the Digby Pines golf course challenges its patrons to play a round “ and try to drive the 11th hole like The Babe did in 1936.”33

Ruth did help the Olympic cause in one small way by attending the farewell banquet in New York on July 14, vigorously and confidently encouraging Jesse Owens to win the gold.34 The Babe also participated in homecoming activities, though, when the team returned to New York. The city hastily planned a ticker tape parade and on September 4 Ruth attended the welcome home banquet sponsored by Mayor LaGuardia on Randall’s Island, the site of Olympic Trials. Each Olympian, inncluding members of the baseball team, received a special bronze medal.35

But while the baseball team was taking the field in Berlin, Ruth was on the links again. August 12–14, the Bambino was playing in a tournament in Upstate New York at the Bluff Point Golf Resort, hosting the St Orleans International Invitational.36 His promises to help the 1936 Olympic team in Baltimore and Berlin went largely unfulfilled, perhaps not by his own wishes.

Dinty Dennis, the Miami News sportswriter who was also the assistant coach for the Olympic team, penned a scathing column on April 12, chastising MLB owners. He accused them of being hypocrites, for signing unproven minor leaguers for $25,000 but refusing to put up a few thousand for the national amateur team.37

Dennis was one of those who selected the team, along with college coaches Harry Wolter (Stanford), Judson Hyames (Western Michigan), Linn Wells (Bowdoin College), and Frank Anderson (Oglethorpe College), as well as Hall of Famer Max Carey and George Lang from the Penn Athletic Club. George A Lang, held an executive leadership position of Mann’s American Baseball Congress and was the USA delegate to the International Amateur Baseball Federaion.38

While the team was to be limited 20 players, 21 were finally chosen, and of those, 16 were associated with the Baltimore trials. The other five came from the Penn Athletic Club, holdovers from the early proposal to send the Penn AC team. Of the 16, only two had no direct connection to the coaches in Baltimore: Paul Amen from Nebraska and Grover Galvin Jr. from Rockford, Iowa. Seven of the players were known by Mann and Carey from either the 1935 Wheaties (Les McNeece, Fred Heringer, Ron Hibbard, and Tex Fore, with Rolf Carlsten an alternate who did not go to Japan) or one of their baseball school sessions (Herm Goldberg and Dow Wilson). Lin Wells picked his team captain and best rival respectively: Bill Shaw and Clarence Keegan, who both were their team’s best hitters. Wolter picked the west coast players: Gordon Mallatratt, Fred Heringer, Ike Livermore (all from his Stanford 1933 team), and Dick Hanna (from the 1936 Stanford team), and rivals Tom Downey from USC and Bill Sayles from Oregon. Hyames was also the coach to Ron Hibbard, who was the Western Michigan center fielder and team captain. Finally, Anderson picked a rival, University of Georgia football and baseball star Henry Wagnon.

Like the Baltimore sandlotters, the Penn AC had financial issues. They were initially allocated to send a whole team. Although the club’s membership came from top families of Philadelphia, including the Shibe family, and the team staged a benefit game against Connie Mack’s A’s, they were thousands of dollars short. While their goal was $5000, they raised a total of $2611, and sent only five players.39 Only four of those were found in the box scores from their games that summer: infielders Rolf “Swede”Carlsten, Earnest Eddowes, and pitchers Carson Thompson and Charles Simons.40 Two special player exemptions to the “strictly amateur” rules were given for Carlsten and the fifth player listed: Curtis Myers.

Carlsten had attended the University of Pennsylvania where he had starred in football and baseball, and had later bumped arround both the Orioles’ farm teams (York, Wilkes-Barre, Cumberland), and the Canadian Football League — from which league he was subsequently bannned when his professional baseball career was uncovered. He ended up the starting second baseman for Penn AC and would be “rechristened” an amateur for the Olympic team.41

The exception made for Myers is even more curious. He was the 21st player added to the supposed 20-man roster, and unlike the other four, he does not appear in any of the numerous Penn AC box scores in the years leading to the Olympics; moreover, a check with the Penn AC Archives did not find him there either. The only note was linked to a semi-pro team in Camden (NJ), the Morgan AC. Yet in the Olympic records, he is listed as being a member of the Penn AC. He was a rather successful college baseball pitcher with a career record of 8-4 and coached by former A’s legend and Hall of Fame Pitcher Charles, “Chief” Bender. .However, Myers was more than just a ballplayer,. Although the fact is not mentioned in any newspaper account of the team, he was also Lieutenant Curtis A. Myers of the US Navy, and had transferred landward to the Philadelphia Naval Yard in summer 1935. Adding to the espionage picture his home was listed as Hartford, Connecticut. His naval record included serving on various ships in the capacity of executive officer, being involved in naval aviation, and having received a Master’s Degree in Paris, France.42 He played baseball at the Naval Academy, graduating in 1927 making him the oldest member on the team and the one who had been out of the sport the longest time. Thus the question was, what was he really up to in Berlin?

Another player of note was the Baltimore tryout catcher, who played left field in the game. His name on the Berlin scoreboard was the very German-sounding “Harold Goldbergh.” In reality, he was Herm Goldberg, the only Jewish player on the team. His baseball legacy is vital to understanding how we today view the team and its moral mission some eighty years later.

Although the Olympic exhibition game had two official scorers — including the father of AP sports, Alan J. Gould — no box score seems to exist, just a line score. The game lasted seven innings and ended on a walk-off home run by McNeece. The final score was 6-5. The AP went on to report, “Only a handful in the vast crowd had any idea who was playing or cared who won.”43

The 1936 Berlin games were not about sports, but something more heinous and disturbing: the propagandization of sport for an immoral regime’s social, political, and cultural agenda symbolic of military conquest. The games were part of the great deception as noted by their stated purpose in the Official XIth Olympiad Report: “Sporting and chivalrous competition awakens the best human qualities. It does not sever, but on the contrary, unites the opponents in mutual understanding and reciprocal respect. It also helps to strengthen the bonds of peace between the nations. May the Olympic Flame therefore never be extinguished.”44

The other sport besides baseball that held a Special Demonstration in 1936 was gliding. Only countries within the specter of ambition of Nazi Germany’s influence were allowed to participate: Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. Moreover, these gliding teams were housed not at the Olympic village but at the German Air Force Aviation Academy in Gatow. The official report confirmed the role of the Luftwaffe with the following: “all arrangements for the comfort and lodging of the group were under the supervision of Air Sport Leader Gerbrecht, who had been assigned to this task by the Reich Air Sport Leader.”45

Not surprisingly, the German Air Command ranked the performances and gave out awards.46

On July 28, 1936 — a mere three days before the opening Olympic ceremonies — Winston Churchill warned that the rising strength of the German Air Force was perilous, stating, “We are in danger as never before….”47 With military conscription in place, gliding introduced German youth into the basics of flight and thus the tactics of air combat. Gliding had become the militarization of sport in its rawest, most unrepentant form. Gliding was elevated to a cultural statement and iconographic descriptor of the nation of Germany in much the way baseball was for the United States, the only two nations to feature Special Demonstration sports.

Was the need to better witness the rise of the Luftwaffe and their pilots’ training skills and its material growth the reason why Lt. Curtis Myers was on the team?

In the heated debate on whether to send a team to Berlin, the issue of whether participation was equivalent to supporting an immoral state government was raised. The words of the German Olympic Organizing Committee verified such concerns: “a mighty all-enveloping educative ideal which rises above the limits of time and the confines of national frontiers, aiming at physical, mental and moral perfection.”48

The elimination of both those national borders and those humans deemed not physically, mentally, or morally perfect was the evil behind the propaganda façade. Years later, Goldberg recalled, “They were telling us … they were getting ready for war, although they didn’t call it that. They just called it the ‘preparation of Germany for expanding its borders.’”49 This deception of their true ambitions was hidden in plain sight, and sadly undiscerned by many of the ballplayers — and other Olympians as well. Les McNeece, the team’s second baseman and the one who hit the game-winning inside-the-park home run, years later noted to a reporter that, “When all the Olympic teams marched into the Stadium, there were thousands of Nazi SS Troops lining the road. We thought they were honoring us.”50

Standing against this immoral ambition on display at the Games would give rise to many heroes, none greater than Jesse Owens, who thwarted Hitler’s desire to prove Aryan superiority by winning four gold medal s and setting three world records. When conntrasted with the other demonstration sport of “Gliding,” staged by the Luftwaffe High Command and featuring future fighter and bomber pilots, baseball represents the pastime of peace This was a team of goodwill ambassadors. Goldberg, the left fielder from Brooklyn, gave the lessons of baseball a most eloquent voice: “I learned to live with the competition, to lose when I had to lose without crying about it. To win when I could win with joyousness and to share with my teammates.”51

And whether your teammate was Jim Creighton, Bill Mazeroski, Joe Carter, or Les McNeece, the shared experience the age-old stanza goes:

“And then Home with Joy.”52

KEITH SPALDING ROBBINS has been a SABR member since 2013. His family’s baseball story is an open book for all, especially if you read John Thorn, Peter Levine, or Mark Lampster. He was named after his father’s uncle, whose namesake building catches its fair share of home runs hit at Cal Tech. Keith has been published in the 2013-2014 Cooperstown Symposium and NINE and his research interests include old-timers games and international baseball tours.

Notes

1 Pete Cava, “Baseball in the Olympics,” Citius, Altius, Fortius (Journal of Olympic History 1997), Vol. 1, #1, Summer 1992, 9-16. M.E. Travaglini, “Olympic Baseball: Was es Das?” The National Pastime #5, Vol. 4 #2, Winter 1985, 46-55.

2 Report of the American Olympic Committee, Games of the XITH Olympiad Berlin, Germany; IVth Olympic Winter Games Garmisch-partenkirchen Germany, ed. Frederick W. Rubien, American Olympic Committee (New York, 1936). The actual attendance number is still in doubt to this day. The general agreement is in excess of 100,000 with the official US American Olympic Team Report stating it at 125,000. In totalitarian Germany of that day the costs of not filling the stadium would have been higher than the ticket price of 1DM.

3 Stanford’s famous Sunken Diamond did not get lights until 1996; in Philadelphia, Shibe Park did not get lights until 1939. To this day two college baseball diamonds have no lights: University of Pennsylvania and Bowdoin Colleges’ Pickard Field. https://www.baseball-almanac.com/stadium/st_shibe.shtml. https://gostanford.com/sports/baseball. https://www.facilities.upenn.edu/maps/locations/meiklejohn-stadium-murphy-field. https://athletics.bowdoin.edu/information/facilities/files/baseball.

4 Michael Clair, “The Complete History of the Walk-Up Song,” MLB.com, July 10, 2019, https://www.mlb.com/cut4/the-complete-history-of-the-walk-up-song

5 Paul Amen, diary journal entry of August 12, 1936, Baseball Hall of Fame File.

6 “Japan Cancels Baseball Trip,” Hawaii Tribune-Herald, December 7, 1935, 4.

7 Travaglini, 53.

8 Chicago World-Telegram, December 12, 1935.

9 Sayuri Gutherie-Shimizu, Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War, University of North Carolina Press, 2012, 169.

10 Mann, Leslie, Baseball Around the World: International Amateur Baseball Federation, Self Published, Springfield MA, Springfield College Library, page 6.

11 “Scalzi Back from Tours,” The Huntsville Times, February 3, 1936, 3. Scalzi was the shortstop for the Alabama Crimson Tide and a 1935 Wheaties All American.

12 Interviewed by Corvallis Gazette Times, September 17, 1937.

13 “Waseda Has Fine Record for Invasion,” The Honolulu Advertiser, July 7, 1936, 11.

14 “Japanese Pitcher Allows Yale No Hits and No Runs,” The Boston Globe, June 9, 1936, 21. Some west coast newspapers erroneously reported this as a perfect game.

15 The Sporting News, April 9, 1936, 8. Advertisement of the American Baseball Olympic Committee.

16 “Babe Ruth rejects offer to play ball with Reds,” The Scranton Republican, March 10, 1936, 16.

17 “St. Joe Selected,” The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 26, 1936, 35.

18 “Cahill May Join Senators Today,” The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 9, 1915, 9. Other players mentioned include Bill Morrisette, Lewis Malone, Rube Meadows, and Dave Roth. Malone and Morrisette were on the 1915 A’s roster, the year after Connie Mack began his first great sell-off.

19 Now it’s the site of a turf multipurpose field enclosed by a track, called Pleyvak Field.

20 “Baseball Amateur Aces Are Gathering for Olympic Tryouts,” The Boston Globe, July 1, 1936, 24.

21 Stuart B. McIver, Touched by the Sun, The Florida Chronicles, Volume 3. Chapter 2,An Olympian Homer, page 14. Chapter on Les McNeece.

22 Bennington Evening Banner, May 23, 1936, p. 4.

23 “Here from Four Corners of Nation to Seek Olympic Places,” The Baltimore Sun, July 5, 1936, 18.

24 “District Baseball Stars Get Olympic Games Try,” The Pittsburgh Press, July 9, 1935, 26. The Sporting News of August 1, 1935, included a team application.

25 “West vs East,” The Reading (PA) Times, February 3, 1936, 14.

26 Jimmy Keenan, “July 8, 1936: Baltimore Police Tame the US Olympic Baseball Team,” SABR Games Project, https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/july-8-1936-baltimore-police-tame-olympic-baseball-team

27 Keenan, “Baltimore Police Tame US Olympic Baseball Team.”

28 “Dinty’s Dugout Chatter”, Column. Miami News, April 12, 1936, 11.

29 “Beware, Poor Fish.” New York Daily News, July 3, 1936, 195.

30 Saskatoon Star-Phoenix of July 6, 1936. The Babe visited Alfred Scadding at a Halifax hospital.

31 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 10, 1936, 17.

32 “Ruth Denies He was Offered Job as Indians’ Pilot,” Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1936, 25.

33 https://www.digbypines.ca/hotel-info/history/ Babe Ruth played a round of golf there.

34 http://jesseowensmemorialpark.com/wordpress1/1936-olympics-in-berlin

35 New York Daily News and Brooklyn Union Times, various stories, September 3-4, 1936.

36 “Ruth Gets 70 in Trial Round,” The South Bend Tribune, August 14, 1936, 28.

37 “Dinty’s Dugout Chatter”, Column. Miami News, April 12, 1936, 11.

38 See X. Page 8. Lang was noted as Vice President of the USABC and the USA delegate to the International Association Baseball Federation.

39 “Pennac Nine Needs $3000 – Or Else- They’ll Stay Home,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 10, 1936.

40 “Athletics Upset Pennac Clubbers in Olympic Tilt,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 7, 1936.

41 Given the issues with Jim Thorpe being stripped of his Olympic medals for playing semi-pro baseball its most curious that both Les Mann and the ever watchful and controlling Avery Brundage would allow a banned-in-Canada professional on the Olympic team, but they did.

42 Before World War II, newspapers published officers’ orders and ship movements. Lieutenant Myers was found approximately every 20 months with new orders. By 1935 he was in the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

43 “100,000 See Baseball Tilt,” The Baltimore Sun, August 13, 1936.

44 The XIth Olympic Games Berlin, 1936. Official Report: Organisationskomitee Für Die Xi. Olympiade Berlin 1936 E. V. Wilhelm Limpert, (Berlin) 1937. Vol 6, 6. This stated is attributed to the dictator of the German state.

45 XIth Olympic Games Berlin, 1936, 1100.

46 Listed in the both Berlin Olympics and the US Olympic Committee reports.

47 XIth Olympic Games Berlin, 229.

48 XIth Olympic Games Berlin, 4.

49 Josh Chetwynd and Brian A. Belton, British Baseball and the West Ham Club, McFarland & Co., 2006, 127.

50 McIver, 15.

51 National Holocaust Museum Oral History files for Herman Goldberg http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn504462.

52 Thomas Newberry, “Base-Ball,” The Little Pocket-Book, 1787 Worcester Edition, (Isaiah Thomas: Worcester, MA) 43.

Spring training for the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro National League began April 1, 1946, at Sulphur Dell in Jim Gilliam’s hometown of Nashville. A brief story in the Nashville Tennessean about the Nashville Cubs, previously the Black Vols, beginning practice alongside the Elite Giants indicated “James Gilliam” would be returning to the Nashville team at third base.1 The Cubs ostensibly served as a minor-league affiliate of the Elites. With established veterans around the Elites infield, the 17-year-old Gilliam likely figured to be nothing more than organizational depth for owner Tom Wilson’s clubs.

During camp, however, Gilliam caught the eye of George Scales, Baltimore’s former manager and current road secretary. George Louis Scales (sometimes listed as George Walter Scales2) was born August 16, 1900, in Talladega, Alabama. In his 33 years in the Negro Leagues, Scales played all four infield positions as well as the outfield and served several years as a manager. He was a steady hitter who in 743 games amassed a .312 average with 59 home runs and 502 runs batted in.3 Bill James ranked Scales as the third-best second baseman in Negro Leagues history in his New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, describing him as a power hitter who “was both fast and quick, but tended to put on weight (he was called ‘Tubby’).”4

Scales broke into the professional black baseball in 1919 as a member of the Montgomery Grey Sox. On April 2, 1938, he found himself at Wilson Park in Nashville, site of spring training for the Elites, assuming the role of player-manager following a stint with the New York Black Yankees.5 In 1946, Scales served as the team’s road secretary, with Felton Snow as manager.

By all accounts, Scales was a knowledgeable manager, well-liked by players. Long-time Elites shortstop Tommy “Pee Wee” Butts, a perennial Negro League all-star, said, “Scales was a little hard on you, but if you’d listen you could learn a lot. . . . Scales could get what he needed out of you.”6

Scales would get plenty out of Gilliam that spring. “Well, it’s true, I’m the one gave Junior Gilliam his chance. I forced them to play him,” Scales said decades later. “Gilliam was a kid had come up from Nashville with the team as a third baseman. The manager had a friend he brought up to play second, but that guy was nothing. So I went to Vernon Green, the owner, and said, ‘Make that man put Gilliam on second,’ and he did, and that was it.”7

The “nothing” player was presumably Frank Russell, who was mentioned as the projected starter in the Baltimore Evening Sun.8 Russell, also a former Black Vol, played second base for the Elite Giants in 1943 and 1944, but shifted to third base in 1946. He would bat only .182 in 55 at-bats that year.9

During spring training in 1946, Scales was watching the right-handed-hitting Gilliam flail at curveballs thrown by right-handed pitchers. “I couldn’t do anything with curveball pitchers,” Gilliam recalled in 1953. “I figured I’d lay back and wait for the fastball, but the pitchers in the Negro National League were smarter than me. They just threw me curves.”10

Having seen enough, Scales is purported to have yelled, “Hey, Junior, get over on the other side of the plate.”11 At 45 years old, Scales was old enough to be Gilliam’s father, and the moniker fit. Jim Gilliam was now Junior Gilliam.

Gilliam’s version of the exchange with Scales, however, suggested it was more like advice than a command. According to Gilliam, Scales approached him one day and asked, “You ever hit left-handed?”

“When I was a kid,” Gilliam replied. “I broke my right arm when I was 12 but I still played with the other fellows. I’d hold my bat in my left arm and the other one, it would be in a cast.”

“Then why not try it that way?” Scales said. “You’re not going any place this way.”12

“This way” was a reference to his unofficialposition in his first season with Baltimore: right-handed-hitting utilityman. “George told me that if I’d learn to switch-hit, I’d never go through life as a utilityman,”13 Gilliam said, smiling, to Bob Hunter for a 1964 Sporting News story. Ironically, Gilliam’s would be remembered as just that — a utilityman, appearing at every position except pitcher, catcher, and shortstop in his 14-year career with the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers.

If anyone in the Negro Leagues could mentor Gilliam on how to hit a curveball, it was Scales. Negro Leagues star and Hall of Famer Buck Leonard said, “George Scales knew how to hit it to a T! Josh Gibson knew it to a T. They hit a curveball farther than they hit a fastball. I saw George Scales hit a curveball four miles!”14

The transition to switch-hitting, while ultimately successful, was not easy. “When I first got over there I was afraid I couldn’t duck,” Gilliam remembered. “The first thing a switch-hitter’s got to know is to duck. But by the end of 1946 I was making the full switch all the time and I found I was able to follow the curve.”15

Butts believed Gilliam was actually a better hitter from the left side than the right. “Right-handed he was stronger, but he wouldn’t get as many hits,” Butts said. “When Scales switched him over, that’s when Junior started hitting.”16

Gilliam was added to the Elites roster and assigned to room with Joe Black. It was as unlikely a pairing as possible. Gilliam was a 17-year-old who had not graduated high school. Black was 22, had served in the military during World War II, and was on his way to earning a degree from Morgan State University. Gilliam was quiet and reserved. Black was outgoing and gregarious.

Neither man could have predicted how intertwined their lives would become. They would compete together with the Elites from 1946 to 1950. Their contracts would be purchased together by the Dodgers, and they’d spend part of 1951 together as teammates with Brooklyn’s Triple-A affiliate, the Montreal Royals. Black would join the major-league club in 1952 and win National League Rookie of the Year, which Gilliam would win in 1953. The two developed such a close friendship that Gilliam would become godfather to Joe’s son, Chico.

While Black might be credited with helping Gilliam grow from a teenager into a man, it was Scales’s instruction that transformed him into a legitimate baseball player. “Gilliam was a little fellow, very fast, didn’t have the strongest throwing arm, but quick,” Scales said years later. “And he wanted to play, that was the main thing.”17

Gilliam’s only known appearance in the first half of the 1946 Negro National League season occurred on Sunday, May 26, against the New York Cubans, when he entered a 4–4 game late at second base. No play-by-play exists for the bottom of the ninth, but the box score lists Gilliam as going 0-for-1. Luis Tiant Sr., throwing in his 16th season for the Cubans, pitched the ninth inning. It’s not known how Gilliam was retired.18 At the age of 17 years, seven months, and nine days, Gilliam had made his Negro National League debut.

Apparently thinking Gilliam was still too young, the Elites turned to two Negro Leagues veterans on June 4 to settle the infield, signing Sammy Hughes to play second and Willie Wells to play third. Hughes, recently released from the Army, was a Negro Leagues veteran, having played since 1930, mostly with Baltimore. Wells, who had begun the 1946 season with the New York Black Yankees, had made his rookie debut in 1924.

The Elites jumped out to a fast start in the second half, opening with a 4–1 record to occupy first place in the NNL. The team was paced by center fielder Henry Kimbro, hitting in the third spot and batting .366. Butts occupied the two hole, sporting a .313 batting average. Midseason signee Wells was batting .344 in the cleanup spot.19

Kimbro, a fellow Nashville native, also took it upon himself to mentor Gilliam. “Henry was a great leadoff man for the Elite Giants,” Gilliam recalled in 1964. “He told me the one thing I must learn was the strike zone. He wouldn’t swing at a ball an inch off the plate. That’s when I learned I couldn’t get good wood on a bad pitch.”20

As the 1946 season continued, it was clear the 35-year-old Hughes’ skills were diminished. Scales approached Gilliam with the idea of focusing only on second base, rather than utility. “We got to have a second baseman to go with Butts,” Scales said. “Sammy was all right, but the Army took it out of his legs. He can’t get around. You try it, Junior.”21

Butts told John Holway for his book Voices From the Great Black Baseball Leagues, “(Gilliam) really liked third base, but George Scales said, ‘No, you’d make a better second baseman.’ And I think he did. They said he had a weak arm, but he really could get rid of the ball and make those double plays. He wouldn’t stumble over the bag. Sometimes I’d say he wouldn’t even touch it.”22

Gilliam finally cracked the starting nine on July 16, lining up at second base and batting eighth with his friend and roommate Black on the hill.23 Gilliam went 0-for-3 with a sacrifice against Cubans pitcher Dave Barnhill. Gilliam’s name would not appear again in a box score until August 18, when, starting at shortstop to spell Butts, he went 1-for-3 with a double and a run scored against the Newark Eagles. His double, his first known Negro Leagues hit, came off Charles England, who surrendered all 12 Elites hits in 7 2/3 innings that day.24 England’s entire Negro Leagues career consisted of two games started, in which he allowed 17 hits and 13 runs in 9 2/3 innings.25

Gilliam soon became a fixture in the Elites lineup at second base, replacing Hughes, who would retire at season’s end. Gilliam started at second on August 27 against Tiant and the Cubans, batting second, a spot in the order that would become quite familiar to him over his career, and went 2-for-5.26 On September 2, he posted a 2-for-4 performance with a triple and an RBI in a 6–1 loss to the Homestead Grays.27

The highlight of 1946 for Gilliam occurred on September 13 as the Elites downed the Cincinnati Clowns of the Negro American League, 10–6. The Baltimore Sun wrote the next day that “Johnny Washington, Junior Gilliam, and Hem (sic) Kimbro were the big guns for the victors.”28 Gilliam went 4-for-5 with a double, a stolen base, and two runs scored. The reference to “Junior” in the September 14 Baltimore Sun article is the first known appearance in print of the nickname Scales bestowed upon Gilliam.

Four days after the end of the season, Gilliam turned 18. He had batted .304 in 46 at-bats for the Giants in 1946.29 Despite the limited playing time Gilliam received, Bob Luke concluded in his book on the Elite Giants, “Other than Gilliam’s and Butts’s performances, neither the Elites as a team nor any individual players had much to cheer about.”30

Junior Gilliam’s baptism into professional baseball was shaped by many great black players who never had a shot at the major leagues. To quote Negro Leagues star Ted Page, “George Scales made Junior Gilliam.”31

STEPHEN W. DITTMORE, PhD, is a professor of sport management and assistant dean at the University of Arkansas. A lifelong Dodgers fan born in Redondo Beach, California, Dittmore is co-author of a Sport Public Relations textbook now in its third edition and has more than 40 peer-reviewed publications. He has been a SABR member since 2018.

Sources

Baltimore Elite Giants photo: John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, Temple University Libraries

Junior Gilliam photo: NoirTech Inc. / Larry Lester

Notes

1 “Barnett Pilots Nashville Cubs,” Nashville Tennessean, March 31, 1946.

2 Some sources such as the Negro Leagues Museum list his middle name as Walter, but his 1918 draft card appears to bear his signature: George Louis Scales.

3 “George Scales,” Seamheads, accessed January 4, 2020, https://seamheads.com/NegroLgs/player.php?playerID=scale01geo.

4 Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 183.

5 Bob Luke, Baltimore Elite Giants, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 39.

6 John Holway, Voices From the Great Black Baseball Leagues: Revised Edition, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 333-4.

7 “George Scales: The Rifle Arm of Negro Professional Baseball,” Black Sports, May 1973, 32.

8 “Zapp New Elite Bat Star,” Baltimore Evening Sun, April 11, 1946.

9 “Frank Russell,” Seamheads, accessed January 4, 2020, https://seamheads.com/NegroLgs/player.php?playerID=russe01fra.

10 “Meet Junior Gilliam! International League’s 1952 MVP,” Our Sports, June 1953, 57.

11 Martha Jo Black and Chuck Schoffner, Joe Black: More Than a Dodger, (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015), 107.

12 “Meet Junior Gilliam!”

13 Bob Hunter, “Gilliam: Unsung, Unhonored—and Unsurpassed,” The Sporting News, April 4, 1964, 3.

14 Holway, Voices, 274.

15 “Meet Junior Gilliam!”

16 Holway, Voices, 335.

17 “George Scales: The Rifle Arm of Negro Professional Baseball,” Black Sports, May 1973, 32-33.

18 “Elite Giants Defeated by N.Y. Cubans, 7–4,” Baltimore Sun, May 27, 1946.

19 “Elite Giants defend loop lead against Cuban foe,” Baltimore Evening Sun, July 16, 1946.

20 Hunter, “Gilliam: Unsung.” 3

21 “Meet Junior Gilliam!”

22 Holway, Voices, 335.

23 “Elite Giants defeat New York Cubans, 5-3,” Baltimore Sun, July 17, 1946, 15.

24 “Elite Giants down Newark team twice,” Baltimore Sun, August 19, 1946, 13.

25 “Charles England,” Seamheads, accessed January 4, 2020, https://www.seamheads.com/NegroLgs/player.php?playerID=engla01cha.

26 “New York Cubans top Elite Giants by 5-1,” Baltimore Sun, August 28, 1946, 14.

27 “Homestead Grays beat Elite Giants’ nine, 6-1,” Baltimore Sun, September 3, 1946, 19.

28 “Elite Giants defeat Cincinnati nine, 10-6,” Baltimore Sun, September 14, 1946, 11.

29 “1946 Baltimore Elite Giants,” Seamheads, accessed January 26, 2020, https://seamheads.com/NegroLgs/team.php?yearID=1946&teamID=BEG&tab=bat

30 Luke, Baltimore Elite Giants, 103.

31 “George Scales: The Rifle Arm.”

Emergence of Summer College Baseball

For more than a century, summertime baseball has been a significant part of the lives of young Marylanders. Over the decades, this has evolved from pickup games to town teams and then to amateur leagues. In the middle of the twentieth century, formal leagues with strict eligibility rules emerged. The focus of this article is on summer baseball leagues for college-age players in the Baltimore and Washington regions over the past century, and the impacts of these leagues on the development of future professional players.1 Teams from the Baltimore and Washington franchises have won 39 of the 75 titles at the iconic All American Amateur Baseball Association (AAABA) championship played each year at Johnstown, Pennsylvania with 68 Baltimore alumni and 67 Washington alumni making it to the major leagues.2

Amateur Baseball in Baltimore

Baltimore amateur baseball was flourishing in the middle of the twentieth century, with more than a hundred teams playing in the region. The roots of that mid-century activity may be traced back to two leagues of the early 1900s.

The first league, founded in 1909, was the Maryland Amateur Baseball League.3 At least one of its teams featured players from Washington College 4 The League did not last, but re-emerged in 1930 and continued as a major force in Baltimore baseball until 1947.5

In 1918, the Baltimore Amateur Baseball League was formed. It lasted continuously through the proliferation of leagues in the Baltimore area in mid-century.6 Started as a league for age 18 and under, the BABL barely touched upon the college age group, but as it evolved, it became more specialized in developing the talents of the older youths. For instance, by 1929, the Homestead Club in that league was featuring an ace pitcher from Loyola College.7

In the maturation process of amateur baseball around Baltimore, the leagues found they needed a superstructure of associations above them. In 1936, two rival associations united to form the Maryland Amateur Baseball Association.8 This association became the canopy under which the amateur leagues thrived. In 1944, the Baltimore Amateur Baseball League came under the aegis of this association. The association oversaw three clusters of leagues that year: Junior Leagues (7 leagues with 45 teams), Intermediate Leagues (7 leagues with 52 teams), and Unlimited Leagues (4 leagues with 33 teams).9

The Impact of Walter Youse

To bring the reader forward into the second half of the century in Baltimore amateur baseball, it’s necessary to introduce two important figures: Dominic Leone and Walter Youse. Leone was a future Baltimore City Councilman who had experience managing local sandlot teams. He and two of his brothers owned a café and tavern in South Baltimore. In 1952, Dom Leone’s team, which would become a famous winning team as Leone’s Café, got its start in the Riverside No. 1 League.10 The following year, the team moved to the age 16-18 Monumental League under the Maryland Amateur Baseball Association, and dominated with talented players like Al Kaline.11 Kaline’s final heroic act as an amateur was tying a game for Leone’s in Gambrills, Maryland just before reporting to the Detroit Tigers.12

Not long after the beginning of Leone’s Café, Youse arrived to take over the helm of the team. He became manager in 1956, and before he was through, would earn legendary status. Youse said about Dom Leone: “You had to be happy working for a man like Dominic. He just didn’t sponsor the team; he had the welfare of the players at heart. He helped the boys who played for us in a lot of ways, including getting jobs.”13 Dominic, Vince, and Tony Leone were elected to the AAABA Hall of Fame in 2006.14

Youse was not only an amateur baseball coach in Baltimore, but a long-time scout with the Orioles, Angels, and Brewers. He briefly managed amateur teams prior to World War II and then became a minor league manager for three teams after the war. He was a successful summer baseball manager of the American Legion Westport Post No. 33 from 1948 through 1955.15 He coached the Calvert Hall High School team beginning in 1953 and stayed through 1958, but he diverted his summers to coaching Leone’s in 1956.16 Before he was through, the Leone’s squad would run through a series of sponsors, and be known also as Johnny’s and Corrigan’s.17

As reported in the Baltimore Sun, “Youse’s run of success with (age) 20-and-under summer league teams starting with Leone’s in 1956 and ending with the Maryland Orioles in 2001 is unmatched. He is the winningest amateur coach in Maryland history.”18

For the first ten years, Youse was his team’s manager, but after that, he called himself the general manager. Nevertheless, as renowned Baltimore sportswriter Jim Henneman put it, “There was no question about who was running the show.” Although Youse was in civilian clothes, he was always on the bench or in the dugout and gave every sign and made every critical in-game decision. 19 Youse’s longest-serving field manager was iconic high school coach Bernie Walter. 20

Teams run by Youse won 46 consecutive Baltimore city titles and a record 19 titles in the AAABA competition in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.21 In total, Youse’s teams won more than 3,000 games and lost fewer than 500.22 Bobby Ullman, a former assistant to Youse, called him “the Babe Ruth of amateur baseball.” 23

More than fifty of Youse’s players rose to become major leaguers.24 These included Dave Boswell, Phil Linz, Ron Swoboda, Jim Spencer, Butch Wynegar, and Reggie Jackson.25 When Jackson arrived under Youse’s tutelage, he seemed to be headed for a football career. For the freshman team at Arizona State (ASU), Reggie had caught seven passes for 98 yards and had rushed for 161 yards at 7.7 yards per carry. ASU baseball coach Bobby Winkles directed Jackson to Leone’s for the summer.26 When Youse saw him in a workout, he couldn’t believe his eyes. He compared Reggie’s speed and power to that of Mantle at age 19.27 He took him on as that summer’s project and was rewarded by the star leading the team to another trip to the AAABA tournament. The scouts attended the tournament in droves, and watched the young slugger put on a power display that launched his baseball career. 28

Reggie Jackson respected Youse’s toughness, saying, “He was a tough cookie to convince. If I hit a ball 450 feet, he’d want to know why it wasn’t 500. Yeah, old Walter was a toughie, but I owe a lot to him.”29

Walter Youse was inducted into the AAABA Hall of Fame in 1998, and died in 2002. The successor team in the Leone’s/Johnny’s/Corrigan’s franchise was called the Maryland Orioles.30 It was managed by Dean Albany, also a scout for the Baltimore Orioles.31 In 2005, the team would be renamed Youse’s Maryland Orioles in honor of the legend.32 The Albany-led Orioles won nine additional AAABA crowns, and Albany himself was inducted into the AAABA Hall of Fame in 2009.33 In achieving this success, Albany’s team had to make two adjustments. First, he noticed that Griffith League competition in the AAABA tournament fared better when they used aluminum in tournament play, because after using wood all summer they could generate greater bat speed when switching to aluminum. So the Maryland Orioles started using wooden bats in 2000. Second, his team had done well in the past with mostly local players and only a few from out of the area, but would have to change. Stated Dean Albany: “Once the Griffith League teams started recruiting out of town players, we had to follow to stay competitive.”34

1946 Griffith League Championship Game on the Ellipse. (BETHESDA BIG TRAIN)

Down the Road in the National Capital Region: Clark C. Griffith League

The National Capital City Junior League, established in 1945, gave many of the most talented young players in the greater Washington area an opportunity to showcase their skills on the Ellipse behind the White House. From its inception, Clark C. Griffith, owner of the Washington Nationals (commonly called the Senators), supported the league. Upon his death in 1955, the league was renamed in his honor.35

Griffith’s nephew Calvin, who had taken over the Senators upon his uncle’s death, had a son named Clark. Clark II illustrated the amateur league’s popularity while describing one night when his team was playing for the 1959 Griffith League championship and the Senators were playing at Griffith Stadium. “At our game, we’ve got people standing four rows deep all around the outfield, the baselines, behind the backstop, people everywhere. As I’m leaving…, a guy yells at me, ‘You know, Clark, you guys outdrew your dad’s team tonight!’ I looked around and thought, ‘Wow, we probably did.’”36

In the late 1960s, the league moved its games off the Ellipse to Northern Virginia in part because of the deteriorated field conditions.37 In 1993, the Griffith League took the step that moved it from a league of mostly local players to the upper ranks of summer collegiate baseball when it decided to follow the lead of the Cape Cod League and switch from the aluminum bats used in high school and college to wooden bats used in professional leagues. League president Mike McCarey explained to The Washington Post: “The premier leagues in the country use wood, and we wanted to step up…. Our function is to get kids with a lot of talent the opportunity to showcase that talent before the scouts. Professional scouts like wood because it gives you an idea of bat control, bat speed.” 38

The Griffith League was a charter member of the AAABA in 1944.39 The Washington franchise won the AAABA national championship ten times: Marx Jewelers (1947), Federal Storage (1956, 1960, and 1962), Reston Raiders (1986), Prince William Gators (1997), and Arlington Senators (1998, 1999, 2001, and 2002). Legendary Griffith League Managers Joe Branzell (1995) and Chuck Faris (2004) as well as Coach Jake Jacobs (2003) have been inducted into the AAABA Hall of Fame.40

Marylanders Steve Barber (Takoma Park/Orioles), Tom Brown (Silver Spring/Senators), Jim Riggleman (Rockville/Nationals Manager), Steve Schmoll (Rockville/Dodgers), and Mark Teixeira (Severna Park/Yankees) are among the 67 Griffith League alumni who made it to the major leagues.41 Derek Hacopian, who managed the Bethesda Big Train to the 2004 league championship and played in the league during his All American college career, is one of more than 250 Griffith League alumni to play in the minor leagues.42

While most Griffith League teams were based in Virginia, the Griffith League did have Maryland-based teams, especially in its last decade, including Baltimore Pride, Bethesda Big Train, Germantown Black Rox, Silver Spring-Takoma Thunderbolts, and Southern Maryland Battlecats. The Griffith League played its last season in 2009 after some of its teams moved to the Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League.43

Shirley Povich Field in Bethesda, Maryland, is home of the Bethesda Big Train in the Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League. (BRUCE ADAMS)

Newcomer in Washington-Baltimore Regions: Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League

The Bethesda Big Train and Silver Spring-Takoma Thunderbolts joined the Clark Griffith League in 1999 and 2000 supported by nonprofit organizations dedicated to providing community-based baseball on the model of the Cape Cod Baseball League. After the 2004 season, the two teams joined with College Park Bombers, Maryland Redbirds, Rockville Express, and Youse’s Maryland Orioles to establish the Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League named to honor former Baltimore Orioles manager Cal Ripken Senior. All six of the teams in the inaugural season were based in Maryland. The new wooden bat league expanded eligibility from the AAABA’s 20 years old and under to include all players with college eligibility remaining.

The inaugural 2005 regular season turned into a battle of champions with the 2004 Griffith champion Big Train edging the 2004 AAABA champion Youse’s Orioles by one game. Big Train and Thunderbolts were declared co-champions when the championship game was rained out. Three different teams won the championship the next three years: Thunderbolts, Youse’s Orioles, and Rockville Express. For the next ten seasons, the league championship games were Big Train versus Redbirds. Big Train captured the crown five times. Redbirds won four in a row from 2012-2015. The teams were declared co-champions in 2018. The Redbirds left the league after the 2018 season, and Big Train captured its eighth league championship in 2019.44

In 2019, the league’s fifteenth season, the league established a Hall of Fame. In addition to Cal Ripken Senior, MLB All Stars Brett Cecil (2005 Thunderbolts/Blue Jays, 2013) and Brian Dozier (2006 Big Train/Twins, 2014) represented in the inaugural class the two dozen Ripken League alumni who have made it to the major leagues.45

Two of the league’s most successful managers were part of the inaugural class. Big Train manager Sal Colangelo has led his team to nine regular season titles and eight league championships with a regular season record of 434 wins and 177 losses for an eye-popping winning average of .710.46 Dean Albany, co-founder of the Ripken League, captured nine AAABA titles in his roles as manager and general manager of Youse’s Maryland Orioles. Bruce Adams, the sixth member of the inaugural class, co-founded the Ripken League, co-founded the Big Train, and led the construction of Shirley Povich Field.47

Collegiate Summer Baseball Register ranked the Ripken League as the third and fifth best league in summer college baseball in 2018 and 2019. Big Train was ranked the nation’s number six team in 2019, highest of any summer team in the country not from the Cape Cod League. In 2011, Perfect Game USA named Big Train the nation’s top summer college team.48

After 21 seasons, 42% of Big Train players have gone on to play professional baseball with sixteen of them making it to the major leagues. After 15 seasons, 440 Ripken League alumni have been drafted by major league teams and thirteen players have signed as free agents.49

The league expanded to include teams throughout the greater Washington region. For the 2020 season, the Ripken League had intended to field six teams: Alexandria Aces, Bethesda Big Train, D.C. Grays, FCA Braves of Virginia, Gaithersburg Giants, and Silver Spring-Takoma Thunderbolts.50 The 2020 Ripken League season was canceled, though, as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Other Maryland Summer Baseball Leagues

Along with the Ripken League, the Maryland summer college-age baseball season features two other organizational entities, a league and an association.51 These are the Maryland Collegiate Baseball League and the Maryland State Baseball Association. They both can be associated with one man, Eddie Brooks, another AAABA Hall of Famer (1997).52

In 1945, a group of individuals interested in promoting amateur baseball throughout Maryland held a series of meetings that resulted in the establishment of the Maryland State Baseball Association. Edward W. “Eddie” Brooks became its first president, a job he held until his death in 1968.53 In his honor, there have been several versions of an Eddie Brooks League, and one still exists today.

During the Seventies and Eighties, the Eddie Brooks League competition centered around Anne Arundel County with a perennial champion being Wagner’s Baseball from Severna Park, as the teams fought for the privilege of representing the league at the AAABA tournament. The age caps at various points had been 18, 19, and 20.54 In 1997, the Eddie Brooks League was reconstituted as a wooden bat league designed specifically for college freshmen and sophomores. That inaugural season saw the league with six teams from the Eastern Shore, Baltimore, Howard, and Prince George Counties, and Baltimore City.55

When the Maryland Collegiate Baseball League was formed in 2007, several teams from the Eddie Brooks League joined. Only the Putty Hill Panthers remain in 2019.56 Two of the current teams are affiliates of Ripken League teams. Those two are the “Little” Big Train and “Little” Gaithersburg Giants. The Rockville Express is a former Ripken League team. Other teams in the league are Baltimore Chop, Baltimore Clippers, Diamond Pros, Dig In Baseball, Koa Sports Green Wave, and Maryland Monarchs.57

The leagues in the Maryland State Baseball Association (MSBA) have teams that contain a mix of junior college and high school players. The association has been headed since 1968 by Charles Blackburn, who has over sixty years of experience in amateur baseball operations. He was inducted into the AAABA Hall of Fame in 2010. MSBA teams serve players 18 and under just as the Baltimore Amateur Baseball League did 100 years ago. With the Cal Ripken League featuring elite Division I players, there remains a strong need to provide player development opportunities for players 18 and under. The leagues under the MSBA are the Eddie Brooks League (reconstituted), Western Maryland League, Blue Ridge League (serving Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania), and Eastern Shore League.58

Moving Forward

The tradition of summer collegiate baseball in Maryland has been well established and has laid the groundwork for hundreds of major league and professional baseball careers. With the continuing presence of the Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League, the Maryland Collegiate Baseball League, and the Maryland State Baseball Association, the Chesapeake Bay State looks forward to many more years of playing its part in the development of baseball talent and showcasing this talent throughout the state.

BILL HICKMAN chaired SABR’s Pictorial History Committee for ten years, and currently maintains the “near major leaguers” database on the SABR website. Bill co-founded the Rockville (MD) Baseball Hall of Fame and is the historian for the Bethesda Big Train Collegiate Baseball Team.

BRUCE ADAMS co-founded Bethesda Community Base Ball Club (1998), Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League (2004), and Fields of Dreams after-school program in Washington, DC (2002). A SABR member since 1990, Bruce was selected as a member of the inaugural class of the Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League Hall of Fame.

Notes

1 According to the NCAA, the first baseball game between colleges was played on July 1, 1859, with Amherst beating Williams 73-32 in a game played under the Massachusetts rules (Daniel Wilco, www.NCAA.com , July 1, 2019). The NCAA was founded in 1906 to add safety and structure to intercollegiate athletics. The first College World Series (CWS) was played in 1947, eight years after the NCAA’s first national basketball championship. California beat Yale by winning the first two games (17-4 and 8-7) in a best of three contest played June 27-28, 1947 (W. C. Madden and Patrick J. Stewart, The College World Series: A Baseball History, 1947-2003, 58, McFarland & Company, 2004). Future president George H. W. Bush played for Yale in that series. Future American League MVP Jackie Jensen played for California.

2 AAABA website, https://aaabajohnstown.org/franchises/ .

3 Baltimore Sun, June 3, 1909, 9.

4 Baltimore Sun, August 4, 1909, 9.

5 Baltimore Evening Sun, August 21, 1930, 31, and Baltimore Sun, March 25, 1947, 19.

6 Baltimore Evening Sun, April 19, 1918, 16.

7 Baltimore Sun, September 2, 1929, 10.

8 Baltimore Evening Sun, December 24, 1936, 14

9 Baltimore Evening Sun, April 27, 1944, 23.

10 John Segraves, “Leone’s ‘Pickup’ Team Ruling Riverside Roost,“ Baltimore Evening Sun, May 30, 1952, 26.

11 Robert Sommers, “Leone’s, Sun Vie,“ Baltimore Evening Sun, May 27, 1953, 78.

12 Baltimore Evening Sun, June 22, 1953, 24.

13 J. Suter Kegg, “Tapping The Keg,“ Cumberland (MD) Evening Times, April 20, 1976, 8.

14 AAABA website, https://aaabajohnstown.org/hall-of-fame-class/2006/ .

15 While with Westport, Youse managed Al Kaline in 1950 and 1951. In one particular game, Kaline played centerfield and then pitched three innings to close out a no-hitter. The Baltimore Sun, July 29, 1951, 31.

16 Email of January 20, 2020, to Bill Hickman from Jim Henneman, who had played under Walter Youse at Calvert High School

17 Pat O’Malley, “Walter Youse Dead at Age 88; ‘Guru of Amateur Baseball,’ “ Baltimore Sun, April 16, 2002, D1 and D4. The three minor league teams managed by Youse were Seaford (Eastern Shore League), Welch (Appalachian League), and Bluefield (Appalachian League).

18 O’Malley, “Walter Youse Dead…

19 Bruce Adams and Bill Hickman interview with Jim Henneman and Dean Albany, January 9, 2020. Also Email of January 28, 2020 to Bruce Adams from Dean Albany.

20 Bernie Walter, baseball coach and athletic director at Arundel High school, was inducted into the American Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame and the National High School Coaches Hall of Fame in 2007, The Baltimore Sun, April 21, 2015, B 1. He was the first individual from Maryland to be inducted into the National High School Hall of Fame, which occurred in 2017.

21 AAABA website, https://aaabajohnstown.org/tournaments/ . Over the 46-year period of 1956-2001, Youse’s teams won the AAABA title 19 times, and finished as the runner-up four times.

22 O’Malley, “Walter Youse Dead…”

23 O’Malley, “Walter Youse Dead…”

24 Email from Dean Albany, former manager of Youse’s Orioles, to Bruce Adams, December 8, 2019.

25 Salisbury (MD) Times, July 18, 1967, 8, Baltimore Evening Sun, August 24, 1976, C 6, and Baltimore Sun, July 17, 1983, C 13.

26 Jim Henneman, “Reggie’s Baltimore Sandlot Days Helped Pay His Big-League Ticket,” Baltimore Evening Sun, September 6, 1985, C 1. Reggie Jackson’s mother lived in Baltimore — a fact confirmed in authors’ interview with Jim Henneman on January 9, 2020 and by Lou Gorman, High And Inside: My Life In The Front Offices of Baseball, 56, McFarland & Company, 2007.

27 Jerry Eaton, “Runs Like A HB Because He Is,“ Arizona Republic, August 7, 1965, 35.

28 Bob Ibach, “Youse Tough Man for Jackson To Convince,” Baltimore Evening Sun, July 16, 1973, C 7.

29 Ibach, “Youse Tough Man…”

30 The years under the various franchise names were as follows: Leone’s 1952-68; Leone’s-Johnny’s 1969-71; Johnny’s 1972-91; Corrigan’s 1992-99; Maryland Orioles 2000-04; Youse’s Maryland Orioles 2005-08; Youse’s Orioles 2009-14.

31 Other franchise managers were Dom Leone, 1952; Ray Muhl 1952-56; Bernie Walter 1966-79; Jim Foit 1980-81; Mel Montgomery, 1982-84; and Norman Gilden 1985-91. Youse and Muhl were co-managers in 1956. Youse managed 1956-1965 and again in the Nineties; held general manager position in intervening years.

32 Use of the names Maryland Orioles and Youse’s Maryland Orioles may be found at Baltimore Sun, March 18, 2005, H4, and Baltimore Sun, August 14, 2005, E2.

33 The strength of the Baltimore amateur franchise over the years may be seen by the large number of major leaguers (68) developing from it. AAABA website, https://aaabajohnstown.org/franchise/baltimore/ .

34 Bruce Adams and Bill Hickman interview with Dean Albany and Jim Henneman, January 9, 2020.

35 Griffith League website, “History of the Clark Griffith League,” https://tinyurl.com/svurngr .

36 Dave McKenna, “Cal Ripken versus Clark Griffith,” Washington City Paper, July 9, 2010.

37 The Washington Evening Star, June 13, 1969, F 4.

38 Frank Hughes, “Wood Bats Prove Big Hit in Clark Griffith League,” The Washington Post, June 25, 1993.

39 The AAABA was organized on Feb. 10, 1944. Shamokin (PA) News-Dispatch, February 10, 1944, 10. The AAABA’s first tourney was held that September at Martin Park of the Glenn L. Martin Company in the Middle River area of Baltimore, Maryland. In the championship game, Cummins Construction of Baltimore beat the Heurich Brewers of Washington, DC. Scrantonian Tribune (Scranton, PA), September 17, 1944, 27.

40 AAABA website, https://aabajohnstown.org .

41 Tom Brown was the first person to play in major league baseball and in a Super Bowl, per Mark Segraves on NBC4, February 24, 2017. AAABA website, https://aaabajohnstown.org/franchise/washington/ .

42 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Griffith_Collegiate_Baseball_League .

43 Mark Giannotto, “Clark Griffith Collegiate Baseball League Falls on Hard Times While Counterpart Benefits,” The Washington Post. July 30, 2010.

44 Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League website, http://www.calripkenleague.org/view/calripkenleague/previous-champions .

45 Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League website, http://www.calripkenleague.org/view/calripkenleague/hall-of-fame .

46 SABR members will recognize the surname Colangelo. Sal’s brother, Mike, was a major league outfielder with the Angels, Padres, and A’s during the 1999-2002 period.

47 For a detailed history of the Bethesda Big Train and Shirley Povich Field, see Bruce Adams, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Big Train,” Bethesda Big Train Baseball 2018 Souvenir Program, 6, accessible on website, http://www.bigtrain.org/history/20-questions.

48 Collegiate Summer Baseball Register bases its rankings on a data base of 8,000 players on the rosters of 260 teams in 32 summer leagues.

49 Statistics on Big Train players maintained by Bill Hickman. Ripken League statistics included in email of December 10, 2019 from Jason Woodward, Commissioner of Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League, to Bruce Adams.

50 Ripken League website, (click on “Teams”), http://www.calripkenleague.org/view/calripkenleague

51 Historically, there have been many more alternatives than just these two. For example, the following source presented the options for summer baseball in the Washington area in 1987: David Izenson, “Summer Baseball Abounds,” The Washington Post, June 25, 1987, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1987/06/25/summer-baseball-abounds/39db8928-d6c0-4cc2-81b3-d4596e9a2e67/ .

52 For decades, Eddie Brooks had been president of the Belair-Harford Road League (founded in 1929), the largest independent amateur league in the US. The Baltimore Sun, June 28, 1948, 14. Brooks also went on to be president of the Maryland Amateur Baseball Association (the organization founded in 1936) starting in 1949 and continuing until it dissolved. Bill Hickman phone interview with Charles Blackburn, Executive Director, Maryland State Baseball Association, January 22, 2020.

53 Maryland State Baseball Association website, http://www.msbabaseball.com.

54 Baltimore Evening Sun, August 3, 1978, E 5; Pat O’Malley, “”Wagner’s, Inc., Succeeds in the Business of Sandlot Baseball, Baltimore Sun, June 25, 1980, 57; and Pat O’Malley, “Two Baseball Teams Combine to Make One Champion,” Anne Arundel County Sun, July 16, 1989, 19.

55 William Haufe, “A League of Their Own,” Easton (MD) Star-Democrat, May 30, 1997, 15.

56 Bill Hickman phone interview with Richard Pietryka, Commissioner, Maryland Collegiate Baseball League, December 8, 2019.

57 Maryland Collegiate Baseball League website, https://www.hometeamsonline.com/teams/?u=BUCKEYE&s=baseball .

58 Bill Hickman phone interview with Charles Blackburn, Executive Director, Maryland State Baseball Association, December 13, 2019.

The online Appendix provides pertinent information for 29 of those players. The other player, Howie Fox, is the subject of this article — he has the unique distinction of being the only man to play for both Baltimore’s minor league Orioles and the major league Orioles which supplanted them.2, 3

RESEARCH PROCEDURE

The information presented in this article was obtained from game accounts and articles provided in numerous newspapers (especially The Baltimore Sun and The Sporting News). Also utilized were various editions of the Baseball Guide and Record Book and the Dope Book (published by The Sporting News), Howie Fox’s “Player Information Cards File” and “Player Clippings File” (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library), The 1955 Baltimore Orioles Sketch Book, and the Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference websites.

RESULTS and DISCUSSION

1943-1952: With the Barons, Reds, and Phillies

Howie Fox was born on March 1, 1921, and broke into organized baseball in 1943 with the Birmingham Barons, the single-A farm team of the Cincinnati Reds in the Southern Association. He turned in a 14–17 won-lost ledger with a 4.83 earned run average. In his next season, also with the Barons, Fox produced a 19–10 record and a league-leading 2.71 ERA, which earned him a late-season call-up with the Reds. He made his major league debut on September 17, 1944, in the first game of a twin bill against the Pirates in Pittsburgh. Fox continued pitching for the Reds (interspersed with a couple stints with their AAA Syracuse farm team) through the 1951 season, compiling a big league W-L record of 40–63. On December 10, 1951, Fox was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. With the Phillies in 1952, Fox produced a 2–7 W-L ledger with a 5.08 ERA. (Additional information on Fox’s performance for the 1943–52 period is given in the Appendix.)

1953: Joining the IL Orioles

The Phillies opened the 1953 season in the City of Brotherly Love and split a pair of games against the New York Giants before traveling to Pittsburgh for a three-game series (April 16–18). After Philadelphia lost the first game, the next two games were rained out. Fox, whose mound performance during spring training had been deemed unimpressive, did not appear in any of the Phillies’ first three games. Before the Phillies left town, Fox was notified that his contract had been sold outright to Philadelphia’s AAA farm club: the Baltimore Orioles of the International League. Fox spoke out against the transaction. He stated he would not got to Baltimore and wanted to be declared a free agent or sold to a Pacific Coast League team (his home being in Coburg, Oregon). However, following a discussion of the situation with Phillies President Bob Carpenter, Fox agreed to join the Orioles at the end of the week.

Fox’s first game with the Orioles was on Sunday, April 26, the lid-lifter of a twin bill against the visiting Toronto Maple Leafs. Howie started, but was knocked out of the box with one out in the second stanza. During his brief outing he gave up five runs on two hits and three bases on balls. Fortunately, the Orioles were able to eventually overcome the deficit and emerge victorious, 12–11, thereby rendering Fox’s initial outing a no-decision. Perhaps contributing to Howie’s dismal beginning was a pulled muscle in his side, which also delayed his next start, the first game of a double dip on May 8 in Syracuse. In spite of surrendering eight hits and issuing six walks in his six-plus innings, Fox benefitted from the home-run hitting of Jack Graham and Roy Weatherly and the last-inning relief of Ken Heintzelman to earn his first triumph, 8–6.

Fox improved to 2–0 with a relief victory on May 12, against against the visiting Syracuse Chiefs, twirling six innings after replacing starter Clarence Marshall, with one man on and nobody out. Howie retired the next two batters and should have also retired the third batter, but a fielding error by shortstop Ted Kazanski prolonged the inning. A single by the Syracuse pitcher followed, driving in the run which knotted the score at 1–1.

The game remained deadlocked until the bottom of the ninth when, with two down, Russell Kerns drew a walk and Joe Lonnett followed with a single. The Chiefs’ skipper then ordered Damon Phillips walked intentionally to fill the bases and bring up Fox … or a pinch hitter. The Baltimore Sun reported that the O’s manager, Don Heffner, “had a choice, and made it without hesitation. Fox took his place at the plate and dropped a clean single in center,” driving in Kerns with the game-winning run.4

Fox provided another fireman rescue in a game two days later, also against Syracuse, taking over for Bob Greenwood in the seventh inning with the bases loaded and two outs. Howie tossed out Ben Zientara to end the inning and then proceeded to shut out the Chiefs in the eighth and ninth frames, saving the 4–0 triumph for Baltimore.

Despite pitching fairly well in his next start, on May 16, Fox absorbed his first defeat as an Oriole. After yielding a first-inning solo homer to Charley Kress, Howie pitched scoreless ball until the sixth session when he walked a pair and gave up a hit, the combination resulting in two more runs for Rochester, which completed the game’s scoring. Cot Deal pitched a complete-game shutout for the Red Wings.

As the season progressed through July, Fox’s mound performance was so-so. At the close of May he had fashioned a 3–1 W-L ledger. By the end of June, his record stood at 6–5, July, 8–8. Then, during the final month and a half of the regular season, Howie became the ace of the Orioles mound corps. During the month of August Howie fashioned a 5–1 W-L record, bringing his season ledger to 13–9. He hurled three complete games, including a 2–0 whitewashing of the Maple Leafs in Toronto on August 9. Then, during the stretch drive for a playoff spot in the first two weeks of September, Howie produced two victories against one defeat. He also saved a game.

Thus, at the conclusion of the regular season, Fox had compiled a 15–10 W-L ledger. The Appendix provides a game-by-game summary of Fox’s slabwork. For comparison, Table 1 presents the final full-season statistics for each of Baltimore’s principal hurlers (i.e., those who pitched 45 or more innings). As can be seen, Howie topped the Baltimore mound staff in wins, innings pitched, and complete games.

Table 1. Final Regular-Season Statistics for 1953 Orioles Hurlers with 45 or More Innings Pitched5

NOTES: (1) An asterisk indicates that the pitcher threw left-handed. (2) The following pitchers had less than 45 innings pitched (with their W-L record in parentheses) — Charles Bowers (1-0); Ben Flowers (3-2); Clarence Marshall (0-1); Lou Possehl (0-1); Vern Taylor (0-0).

The 1953 Baltimore Orioles team finished with an 82–72 (.532) record, which ranked fourth and earned them a playoff spot for the International League Championship (aka the Governor’s Cup). In the first round, the O’s squared off against the first-place Rochester Red Wings (97-57, .630). Fox was Baltimore’s starting pitcher in the opening game. He had allowed a solitary run through six frames before running into difficulty in the seventh when, after he had retired the first two batters, he gave up a single to Vern Benson and hit Charley Kress with a pitched ball. Fortunately, Kent Peterson came in to put out the fire by retiring the .346-batting Tom Burgess, thereby preserving the 2–1 Orioles lead. Unfortunately, Peterson was racked for three runs in the bottom of the eighth inning and the Flock was shackled with a 2–4 defeat.

Baltimore managed to win three of the next four games to take a 3–1 lead into game five. Fox started that game at home in Memorial Stadium. An O’s victory would clinch the first round and promote them into the second round against the winner of the Montreal-vs.-Buffalo series. Howie pitched scoreless ball through the first three frames. The O’s took a 1–0 lead in the bottom of the third when Fox singled, advanced to second on a walk to John Mayo, and scored on a single to left by Ralph (Putsy) Caballero. But, in the top of the fourth inning Rochester came right back with a pair of runs to gain the advantage. Then, in the fifth, Fox gave up a two-out solo homer to player-manager Harry Walker.

Howie then pitched scoreless ball in the sixth and seventh sessions, keeping the O’s in close striking distance. However, in the eighth Fox and two relievers were mauled. Wally Moon led off with a walk. Benson then scratched a bunt hit trying to sacrifice. The ball could have been handled by either Fox or first baseman Mayo, both hesitating for the other. Howie was derricked at this point and replaced by Heintzelman, who was subsequently replaced by Jack Sanford.

The end result was the Red Wings tallied six runs and wound up winning the game, 9–2. Rochester would win the next two games and the series, four games to three. Baltimore’s 1953 minor league season was finished. Baltimore’s 1954 major league season commenced just a week later.

1954: The “New” Orioles

Following the September 29, 1953, announcement that the St. Louis Browns were moving to Baltimore for the 1954 season, Arthur Ehlers, the general manager of the “new” Orioles, began to assemble the spring training roster. On January 16 it was reported that Ehlers “probably will take Howie Fox and Damon Phillips to the major-league Orioles spring base at Yuma, Ariz., next month.”6 And, when the “First Baltimore A.L. Roster in 50 Years” was published in the February 17, 1954, issue of The Sporting News, both Fox and Phillips were on it.7 However, before the completion of the 1954 Cactus League, the Orioles sold Phillips’ contract to the Richmond Virginians.8 When the 1954 Opening Day arrived on April 13, Howie Fox was one of 13 pitchers on the regular-season roster.9 (The complete Opening Day roster is provided in the Appendix.)

Howie’s first mound appearance came on April 17 against the Tigers at Memorial Stadium, in relief of starter Joe Coleman. When he came in to pitch the ninth, “Howie [got] a rousing welcome as he made his first appearance here as a major leaguer.”10 He retired Jim Delsing on a groundout (third baseman Vern Stephens to first baseman Eddie Waitkus), walked Harvey Kuenn, and finished up by getting Ray Boone to ground into a 6-4-3 double play (Billy Hunter to Bobby Young to Waitkus).

For the remainder of the season Howie was used exclusively in relief. Overall he appeared in 38 games with a total of 73.2 innings pitched; he compiled a 1–2 record and a 2–2 SV-BSV ledger. Howie’s two best stretches of relief work were as follows:

1. The seven games from June 4 through June 19 in which he gave up one run in 11 innings
2. The six games between June 23 and July 18 in which he pitched shutout ball for 16.1 innings

From June 4 through July 18 he was pretty much lights-out as he gave up only three earned runs in 27.1 innings, affording an ERA of 0.99 for that stretch. However, for the entire 1954 season, Fox’s ERA was 3.67. For comparison, Table 2 lists the pertinent statistics for the four pitchers who were the principal relief hurlers for the 1954 Orioles. (The Appendix provides game-by-game details for Fox’s 38 games.)

Howie achieved his only victory in the May 10 game against the visiting Philadelphia Athletics. The O’s starting pitcher, Don Larsen, was rocked for four runs in the top of the seventh, giving the A’s a 5–3 lead. Larsen was pinch-hit for in the bottom of the seventh and Fox took over the mound duties in the top of the eighth. Howie set down the three men he faced (Lou Limmer, Gus Zernial, and Bill Renna) in 1-2-3 fashion. In the top of the ninth, Howie was nicked for a run which put Philadelphia on top, 6–3. But, the Flock rallied in the bottom of the ninth, tallying four runs to win the game: walks to Clint Courtney and Jim Fridley (batting for Fox) and a single by Bobby Young loaded the bases. Gil Coan’s single batted in Courtney, and Dick Kryhoski’s double plated Fridley and Young. Sam Mele then hit a sacrifice fly to bring in Coan with the game-winning marker.

Although saves were not tracked at the time, Fox picked up his first one in the game on June 12 at Griffith Stadium against the Washington Nationals. He took over for starter Lou Kretlow in the bottom of the ninth with the O’s leading, 7–3. Howie proceeded to retire the first two batters (Tom Umphlett and Ed Fitz Gerald) before walking Wayne Terwilliger. He then struck out Clyde Vollmer to end the game.

The last game that Fox pitched for the 1954 Flock was on September 25 against the White Sox; it was also the final game of the season. Chicago had a 9–0 lead when Howie took the mound to start the top of the eighth. He set the Pale Hose down in order, getting Chico Carrasquel on a popout, Nellie Fox on a flyout, and Minnie Minoso on a groundout. However, in the ninth, Fox was rocked for a pair of tallies — after he had retired the first two batters (Phil Cavarretta and Jim Rivera), Willard Marshall singled and Sherman Lollar doubled, putting runners at third and second. Joe Kirrene then hit a two-run single before Howie got Billy Pierce to ground out to end the inning.

Table 2. Final Regular-Season Statistics for 1954 Orioles Hurlers Who Were Principal Relievers

NOTES: (1) Statistics given in the “SV-BSV (AVE)” column are from the Baseball-Reference website; all other statistics are from the Retrosheet website, and were obtained by summing the numbers given in the Retrosheet Player Daily File (i.e., not from the Player Profile Page). (2) The statistics for Bob Chakales are for his relief appearances only — i.e., the numbers for his games started appearances were not included in summing the numbers given in his Retrosheet Player Daily File. For example, while with Baltimore, his overall W-L record was 3–7; in the games he started his W-L record was 0–3; therefore his W-L as a relief pitcher was 3-4. The same procedure was employed for the statistics in the other columns. (3) The following pitchers also had relief appearances (G-GR-GF): Ryne Duren (1-1-0); Jay Heard (2-2-0); Dave Koslo (3-2-1); Lou Kretlow (32-12-2); Don Larsen (29-1-1); Dick Littlefield (3-3-1); Billy O’Dell (7-5-4).

1955: Move to the Missions

The 1954 major league Orioles (54–100) did not fare as well the 1953 minor league Orioles (82–72). The 1954 Flock ended up in seventh place, 57 games behind the AL pennant-winning Cleveland Indians. To deal with this poor-performance issue, one major change was announced prior to the conclusion of the 1954 season — General Manager Ehlers and Field Manager Jimmy Dykes would be replaced by Paul Richards (who relinquished his managership of the White Sox with nine games left).11 There were also many changes in the player roster. Howie Fox, who had played some winter ball with the Caracas Lions in the Venezuelan League after the 1954 campaign ended, signed his 1955 Orioles contract on February 8.12 He was included in the Spring Training Roster published in the 1955 Baltimore Orioles Sketch Book.

But in early March he was assigned to the San Antonio Missions (the O’s AA farm club in the Texas League) as a pitcher-coach to help with the team’s training and then later to go on San Antonio’s roster as a regular hurler.13 Even though Fox had joined the Missions, he was retained on the Baltimore roster until May 3, when he was released by the Orioles. This allowed Fox to accrue the time needed to reach ten-year status as a big leaguer.14 In his San Antonio debut, on May 7 against Shreveport, Howie tossed a four-hitter to defeat the Sports, 6–2.

For his full season with San Antonio Howie appeared in 29 games, ten of which were starting assignments. His W-L record was 3–8 (.273) and his ERA was 3.89 in 104 innings pitched. With their second-place finish, the Missions earned a spot in the playoffs. However, they were eliminated (four games to two) in the first round by Shreveport. Howie pitched in relief in three of the six games without having a decision. He gave up 2 runs (both earned) on six hits in four innings; he walked two batters and struck out one.

Fox’s final game was on September 11; he hurled a scoreless 8th inning in San Antonio’s 11–7 setback to Shreveport in game- five. As it turned out, the 1955 campaign was the final season in Howie Fox’s professional baseball career. Tragically, shortly after the season ended, Howie Fox was murdered on October 9.15

Concluding Remarks

Altogether, in his two seasons with Baltimore, Howie Fox won 16 games and lost 12. He was the ace of the O’s pitching staff in 1953, the team’s last year. He was probably the second-best fireman on the Flock’s relief corps in 1954 and the only man to play for both of those minor league and major league Orioles teams.

HERM KRABBENHOFT, a SABR member since 1981, is a retired research chemist (organic synthesis and polymer chemistry). Over the years his baseball research has been published in Baseball Digest, The Sporting News, Baseball America, Baseball Weekly, and several SABR publications, including The Baseball Research Journal, The National Pastime, By The Numbers, The Inside Game, and Nineteenth Century Notes. He has also described his research in 26 oral presentations at SABR National Conventions. His 2012 BRJ article, “Lou Gehrig’s RBI Record:1923-39,” was selected for inclusion in “SABR 50 at 50: The Society of American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most-Essential Contributions to the Game.” Herm’s recent baseball research endeavors have encompassed five-tool players, quasi-cycles, and day-in/day-out double-duty diamondeers.

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to express my tremendous gratitude to Cassidy Lent, Research Librarian at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, for graciously providing scans of the “Player Information Cards File” and “Player Clippings File” for Howie Fox, and selected pages from The 1955 Baltimore Orioles Sketch Book and The 1955 Sporting News Dope Book. I also express my grateful thanks to Cliff Blau for his outstanding fact-checking of the information presented in this article.

Dedication

I gratefully dedicate this article to my good friend David Newman, a superb baseball researcher who has enthusiastically helped me out numerous times with special trips to the Library of Congress. THANKS so very much, Dave, for your expert collaboration. All the best to you and Carol!

Notes

1 J.G. Taylor Spink in collaboration with Paul A. Rickart, Ernest J. Lanigan, and Clifford Kachline, “The Year 1953 in Review,” Baseball Guide and Record Book 1954 (St. Louis, MO: The Sporting News, 1954), 95.

2 Hugh Trader, Jr., “Orioles Retain Pair of Vets, Sell 14 From Team’s International Roster,” The Sporting News, January 27, 1954, 16.

3 While Howie Fox is unique in being the only player from the 1953 minor league Baltimore Orioles to play with the major league Orioles in 1954, there were five other players who had played with the minor league Orioles prior to 1953 and subsequently played with the major league Orioles in 1954 or later: Bob Kuzava, Joe Frazier, Bobby Avila, Bobby Young, and Jim Dyck. The Appendix provides the pertinent information for each of these players.

4 C.M. Gibbs, “Pitcher Wins Contest With Two Men Out — Singles To Score Kearns; Gains Victory in Relief Role,” The Baltimore Sun, May 13, 1953, 21.

5 Statistics compiled by Al Munro, Elias Baseball Bureau, from Baseball Guide and Record Book 1954, 214.

6 Louis M. Hatter, “Richmond Nine Eyes Ex-Birds,” The Baltimore Sun, January 16, 1954, 11.

7 Herb Heft, “Orioles Weak in Pitching? Not in Numbers at Least,” The Sporting News, February 17, 1954, 16.

8 “Deals of the Week,” The Sporting News, April 7, 1954, 28.

9 “Orioles Roster and Playing Records,” The (Baltimore) Evening Sun, April 15, 1954, 58.

10 Ned Burks, “Orioles Bow to Tigers, 1-0,” The Baltimore Sun, April 18, 1954, 29.

11 Ned Burks, “Richards Accepts 3-Year Contract With Orioles,” The Baltimore Sun, September 15, 1954, 17.

12 Bob Maisel, “11 Players Remain Out of Bird Fold … Howie Fox Signs Oriole Contract,” The Baltimore Sun, February 8, 1955, 19.

13 “Fox Sent to San Antonio,” The Evening Sun, March 2, 1955,50. See also related items in The Baltimore Sun, March 3, 1955,21 and The Evening Sun, March 29, 1955, 29.

14 Jesse A. Linthicum, “Bird Seed,” The Sporting News, March 9, 1955,24. See also related items in The Sporting News, May 18, 1955, 32, 34.

15 “Howie Fox, Former Oriole, Stabbed to Death in Texas,” The Baltimore Sun, October 10, 1955, 1.