Introduction and Context

The disquieting year of 1981 featured the worst upheaval in baseball history — to that point in time — due to a players strike that erased roughly one-third of the regular-season schedule.  Play was halted on June 12, and after weeks of acrimonious negotiations between players, club owners, and their respective representatives, a settlement was reached that allowed for a resumption of the championship season on August 10. The key factor in the dispute was compensation demanded by teams that lost players, especially those of the highest quality, to free agency. Newly implemented was a rule that created a pool of players from which those clubs could draft a compensatory replacement to fill the void left by the departed free agent. This rule was opposed by the Major League Baseball Players Association due to concerns about the negative impact it could have on the bargaining rights of players chosen as compensation.   

Teams that had been at the top of their division at the time of the strike were declared “first-half” winners, and when play resumed after a delayed All-Star Game on August 9, those clubs that won their division in the “second-half” of the regular season would face the “first-half” victors in a special divisional playoff series that prefaced the normal League Championship Series. When the smoke cleared in late October, the Yankees engaged the Dodgers in the World Series, won by Los Angeles in six games on the heroics of Ron Cey, Pedro Guerrero, and Steve Yeager, all of whom were named co-MVPs of the series. The Dodgers’ victory was the capstone to a season in which Los Angeles rode a wave of “Fernandomania,” the catchy epithet used to describe enthusiasm generated by the deeds of the team’s sensational rookie pitcher, Fernando Valenzuela.   

Against this backdrop of labor rancor and the subsequent redemption of a thrilling postseason, major-league baseball held its annual winter meetings from December 7 through the 11th at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida.     

The Business Side

With over five years having passed since the landmark Messersmith decision that facilitated free agency, the financial state of the game was less than promising.  Addressing the gathering of owners, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn stated that baseball collectively lost $25 million in 1980, and the accounting data for the just-completed season would reveal, according to Kuhn, a $50 million loss.1 Only nine of the 26 major-league franchises turned a profit in 1980, and some small-market teams, already at a disadvantage because of lower revenue streams, sought some form of revenue-sharing to be modeled on a system used by the National Football League. The pooling and redistribution of a sports league’s monies had already taken root in the NFL, and this move had been initiated — successfully so — to ensure the stability of weaker and small-market clubs. Well-funded major-league baseball teams, however, were less than enthusiastic to provide alms for their poorer brethren. Orioles owner Edward Bennett Williams was leading the effort to remedy the disparity and “appear[ed] to have made some progress, but most of the owners in the larger markets … aren’t overly anxious to slice up the pie.”2  

During a quick trip to the nation’s capital on December 9, Kuhn fanned the flames of the revenue debate when he testified before a congressional subcommittee and expressed concern about “the potential overexposure of baseball games on cable television [that] threatens the economic viability of the sport.”3 Kuhn’s remarks drew a sharp rebuke from Ted Turner, owner of television superstation WTBS and the Atlanta Braves, whose games were beamed to cable outlets nationwide.  It was acknowledged at the winter meetings that the American and National League rules dealing with radio and television  licensing, some of which were decades old, needed amending in order to account for the “new technology and terminology that didn’t exist when the [leagues’] charters were adopted.”4

Another proposal under consideration by the owners concerned the realignment of each league into three divisions, a concept that would have led to an additional round of playoff games. However, the proposal failed, primarily because of a noticeable lack of support in the National League. The restructuring of the American League required the approval of 10 of its 14 franchises, and informal voting among the junior circuit’s moguls seemed to favor the change. But National League bylaws called for unanimous approval, and Dodgers President Peter O’Malley was the most powerful among a bloc of five owners strongly believed to be opposed to three-division league formats.5

While the midsummer players strike was thankfully in the past, the owners were beginning to cast a wary eye on negotiations with the umpires union, whose contract had expired at the conclusion of the 1981 season. Bargaining sessions had commenced, noted Blake Cullen, the National League supervisor of umpires, but the progress was slow in the early going. 6

At the senior level of the uppermost echelon of major-league baseball’s power structure, the Executive Council named Baltimore’s Edward Bennett Williams, the Brewers’ Bud Selig, and Ballard Smith of the Padres as new members, replacing John Fetzer of Detroit, Ed Fitzgerald of Milwaukee, and Peter Bavasi of Toronto. Selig and Eddie Chiles of the Texas Rangers were also named to the Player Relations Committee to replace Fitzgerald and Minnesota’s Calvin Griffith. Owners also approved the use of batting helmets with double earflaps, and voted to restrict the size of major-league rosters after August 31 to 28 players rather than 40.7

Minor-league business at the meetings created barely a ripple, but several club officials were recognized for their efforts in 1981. Pat McKernan (Triple-A Albuquerque Dukes), Allie Prescott (Double-A Memphis Chicks), and Dan Overstreet (Class-A Hagerstown Suns) were named by The Sporting News as the top executives of their respective levels.8            

The drama receiving the most attention was a nefarious move that threatened to displace Bowie Kuhn from the commissioner’s office. Still stung by what was perceived as his aloofness during the summer strike, Kuhn remained in the crosshairs of a cabal of representatives from nine teams seeking his ouster. Kuhn claimed that Lou Susman, an attorney working for the St. Louis Cardinals, was “secretly campaigning” to undermine him.9 The group of conspirators consisted of Edward Bennett Williams, Ballard Smith, John McMullen (Houston), Bill Williams (Cincinnati), Eddie Chiles, George Steinbrenner (Yankees), George Argyros (Seattle), Nelson Doubleday (Mets), Fred Wilpon (Mets), and Susman. Reporting for the New York Times, Joseph Durso listed Edward Bennett Williams as “the leader of the revolt against Kuhn’s role as commissioner.”10 Less than two weeks before the winter meetings, Kuhn’s detractors had met in New York and drafted what soon became known as the “Hollywood Letter,” a missive calling for Kuhn’s resignation. 

Several days into the gathering in Florida, the anti-Kuhn forces, letter in hand, convened on the evening of Wednesday, December 9, “and decided to press for a restructuring of the high command during Thursday’s league meetings.”11 Meanwhile, a group of pro-Kuhn owners, led by the Dodgers’ O’Malley and dubbed “the white hats,” learned of the plot and held their own confab a few hours the next morning to discuss ways to rally support for the imperiled commissioner. While Kuhn was the most visible figurehead among all baseball executives, he had no control over how owners and teams spent their money. Nonetheless, Kuhn had become the scapegoat for the financial losses of the previous years and the widening gap between richer and poorer teams.

Kuhn retained his composure even when the existence of the letter was revealed, and, defending himself in the face of the onslaught of criticism, he explained that his hands were tied to a great extent during the recent strike because the owners’ Player Relations Committee — not the commissioner’s office — was tasked with negotiating with the players union.12 The meeting of National League owners was notably divisive, but a modicum of peace was restored when a new committee of executives was formed to study possible restructuring of the highest offices of baseball. In a superficial attempt to put the matter to rest, the Hollywood Letter was “symbolically torn up by Susman.”13

Kuhn’s term as commissioner was not set to expire until August of 1983, and the terms of his contract held that no discussion of his status could take place until 15 months before its termination. The preemptive assault on the commissioner by his detractors failed, and although he had survived this battle, Kuhn admitted that the shredding of the letter did nothing to dispel the bile among those who ardently sought his removal. This war on Kuhn, initiated by a select group of owners, would continue beyond the conclusion of the 1981 winter meetings.    

Personnel Dealings

A prelude to the traditional player transactions at the winter meetings occurred in late November when one trade was completed and another begun. In a swap of former All-Star outfielders, the Detroit Tigers sent former top draft pick and slugger Steve Kemp to the White Sox for Chet Lemon, and ground was broken on a three-way deal involving the Philadelphia Phillies, Cleveland Indians, and St. Louis Cardinals. The Phillies traded outfielder Lonnie Smith and a player to be named later to the Indians for catcher Bo Diaz, and Cleveland immediately shipped Smith to the Cardinals for two pitchers, Lary Sorensen and Silvio Martinez. This trade was completed at the winter meetings when the Indians picked up pitcher Scott Munninghoff from the Phils.     

When the action moved to Florida, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, never shy about amending his roster or management team, announced that manager Bob Lemon would be allowed to pilot the Bronx Bombers for the 1982 season, after which Gene Michael would take over in the Yankee dugout from 1983 through 1985. Another former Yankees skipper, Ralph Houk, had his contract extended through the 1984 season by the Boston Red Sox.     

On the ever-popular trading front, activity was relatively slow, leading one major newspaper to comment that most of the winter meetings consisted of “four days of boredom interspaced with rumors.”14 While many clubs may have been waiting until spring training of 1982 to evaluate their squads before ultimately deciding on how to address problem areas, 36 players were nonetheless swapped in 16 separate transactions. This total was off by a substantial margin from the previous winter meetings, at which 59 players were swapped in 18 trades. 

Outfielder Clint Hurdle, the bright Royals star who once graced the cover of Sports Illustrated but had been disabled for most of 1981, was sent to the Cincinnati Reds for pitcher Scott Brown, who had spent most of his professional career in the Reds’ minor-league system.

Pittsburgh sent veteran shortstop Tim Foli to the California Angels for catching prospect Brian Harper. Seeing only limited playing time with the Bucs and three other teams in the mid-1980s, Harper did not start having his best years until 1988 when he joined the Minnesota Twins. But just as he had done for the Pirates in their championship season of 1979, Foli paid a quick dividend for the Angels by helping to anchor their infield during California’s drive to the 1982 AL West pennant.  

The Mets traded the middle of their infield, exchanging shortstop Frank Taveras for Montreal pitcher Steve Ratzer and cash. The former ironically had been traded in 1979 from Pittsburgh to the Mets for the aforementioned Foli, while the latter, like Scott Brown, appeared in only a handful of major-league games up to 1981 and would never pitch at that level again. New York also sent second baseman Doug Flynn and hurler Danny Boitano to the Texas Rangers for closer Jim Kern. Flynn had been a key acquisition from the Reds as part of the controversial 1977 trade of Tom Seaver to Cincinnati but was a mediocre hitter at best, and Boitano, who pitched for several years in the Phillies and Brewers organizations, pitched only 30 innings for the Rangers in 1982, his last year in the majors. A three-time American League All-Star reliever in the late 1970s, Kern fell victim to injuries in mid-1980 and had become a rehabilitation project. The tall right-hander never pitched for the Mets, as he was traded, along with Alex Trevino and Greg Harris, for Reds slugger George Foster two months later as spring training commenced.                

Seattle’s Tom Paciorek, whose .326 average was runner-up to Boston’s Carney Lansford for the 1981 American League batting crown, was sent to the White Sox for outfielder Rod Allen, shortstop Todd Cruz, and catcher Jim Essian. Allen had no impact for the Mariners, and Essian saw only limited duty behind the plate, but Cruz became Seattle’s primary shortstop in 1982 before moving on to Baltimore. First baseman Paciorek, whose two other brothers also played in the major leagues, hit well for the White Sox (.312 in 1982, .307 in 1983) and continued to do so later for the Mets and Rangers in a career that eventually spanned 18 years.

After spending just one season in San Francisco, outfielder Jerry Martin was shipped to the Kansas City Royals for two pitchers, Rich Gale and Bill Laskey. Gale had been a top prospect in the Royals’ system but had alternating good and bad years since his 14-win, 3.09 ERA debut in 1978; Laskey blossomed briefly, winning 13 games in both 1982 and 1983. Martin, meanwhile, found a place in the Royals outfield, batting .266 in 147 games during 1982. However, he was swept up in the drug scandal that was soon to plague major-league baseball. Along with fellow Royals Willie Wilson, Willie Mays Aikens, and, most notoriously, Vida Blue, he would serve time in jail for involvement with cocaine. 

The Giants added outfielder-first baseman Doe Boyland from the Pirates in exchange for pitcher Tom Griffin, swapped hurler Doug Capilla for the Cubs’ Allen Ripley, and traded outfielder Larry Herndon to the Tigers for pitchers Dan Schatzeder and Mike Chris. San Francisco had set out to add one southpaw to its pitching staff at the meetings, but actually ended up with three (Capilla, Chris, and Schatzeder).       

Now operating in Chicago, Dallas Green, the new general manager of the Cubs, worked on retooling the team’s lineup, first by sending pitcher Mike Krukow and cash to the Phillies — Green’s former employer — for pitchers Dan Larsen, Dickie Noles, and catcher Keith Moreland. 

It is important to note that one trade that did not take place was a deal involving a prized prospect in the Philadelphia organization. Long rumored to be included in trades for several weeks, Ryne Sandberg was finally acquired in late January 1982 in a trade that brought the future Hall of Famer — along with shortstop Larry Bowa — to the Cubs for shortstop Ivan DeJesus. Based on accounts in The Sporting News at that time, one can draw the conclusion that Green had to have been laying groundwork for a deal involving Sandberg but did not complete trade talks until several weeks after the conclusion of the winter meetings.15        

Former National League Rookie of the Year Rick Sutcliffe, a 17-game winner for the Dodgers in 1979, appeared to be destined more for a minor-league bullpen than continued success at the major-league level after posting two dismal seasons (five total wins with a collective ERA of 5.10, in 1980 and 1981) following his stellar debut. Still perhaps overwhelmed by “Fernandomania” and basking in the glow of its World Series title, Los Angeles decided to move Sutcliffe and second baseman Jack Perconte to Cleveland for outfielder Jorge Orta — a former American League All-Star — catcher Jack Fimple, and pitcher Larry White. 

One of the last vestiges of the Big Red Machine, outfielder Ken Griffey, had been traded to the Yankees along with pitcher Brian Ryder a month before the gathering in Hollywood. At the meetings, the Reds completed the deal by acquiring pitcher Fred Toliver from New York. 

In a swap of outfielders, the Astros sent Gary Woods to the Cubs for Jim Tracy, with both players immediately assigned to their new team’s Triple-A affiliate. The Cardinals signed a pair of pitchers from the Mexican League, Eric Rasmussen of the Yucatan club, and former American Leaguer Vicente Romo of Coatzacoalcos.

American League West rivals Seattle and Oakland completed a trade in which the Mariners shipped infielder-outfielder Dan Meyer, who had twice enjoyed 20-homer seasons, to the Athletics for Rich Bordi, a 6-foot-7-inch reliever who would end up pitching for four other clubs over the following six years. These teams also completed a trade in which the A’s sent pitcher Roy Thomas to the Mariners for outfielder Rusty McNealy and pitcher Tim Hallgren. 

In the annual major-league Rule 5 draft, held on December 7, 10 players were selected by other organizations for $25,000 apiece. Among these, only two players — pitcher and former Cardinal farmhand Jim Gott, and infielder Domingo Ramos, late of the Blue Jays — would enjoy any future success with his new club. While neither Gott nor Ramos racked up big numbers, they did exhibit staying power by each accruing 11 years of service time with four different big-league teams.                      

Other instances of post-meeting trades that had been initially discussed in Hollywood, were those involving the Houston Astros’ Cesar Cedeño, once one of the best all-around players in the game but now in noticeable decline, for Cincinnati third baseman Ray Knight. Knight was the heir-apparent to Pete Rose following Rose’s departure to Philadelphia at the end of the 1978 season, but he became expendable after his batting average dropped nearly 60 points from 1979 to 1981. But perhaps the biggest laying of groundwork for a future trade occurred in a transaction between the Cardinals and Padres.

On December 10, St. Louis dealt outfielder Sixto Lezcano to San Diego for pitcher Steve Mura, and these principals were each accompanied by the ubiquitous player-to-be-named from their respective clubs.  Having already surrendered two pitchers — Lary Sorensen and Silvio Martinez — in previous trading, Cardinals manager and GM Whitey Herzog stated that he was in the market for more frontline pitching, so it was fair to assume that at least one more hurler would be forthcoming from the Padres. At the onset of the meetings, however, Herzog alluded to possibly dealing his gifted but troubled shortstop, Garry Templeton. Having fallen out of favor with Cardinals fans and his own teammates, especially after a late August home game in which he made obscene gestures to the crowd at Busch Stadium, Templeton was placed on Herzog’s trading block.

After weeks of haggling following the initial Lezcano-Mura trade, Templeton and All-Star shortstop Ozzie Smith were announced — on February 11, 1982 — as the players swapped to complete the trade first brokered in Hollywood. Smith would go on to anchor the Cardinal infield for three National League crowns and a World Series title while endearing himself to St. Louis fans for the remainder of a career that landed him in Cooperstown. Templeton, feeling more comfortable closer to his home in Santa Ana, California, helped the Padres to the 1984 National League pennant, but he never fulfilled the promise he displayed during his early years when he hit well over .300 in three of his first four seasons as a Cardinal. 

Several free-agent signings at the winter meetings involved some well-known names, including former Boston outfielder Joe Rudi and Texas right-hander Fergie Jenkins, who returned to the cities that initially launched them into prominence, Rudi back to Oakland, Jenkins back to Chicago for another stint with the Cubs. Reliever Bill Campbell, also formerly of Boston and a member of the first big free-agent class of 1977, followed Jenkins to Wrigley Field by signing as a free agent. Others, such as outfielder Cesar Geronimo (Kansas City), infielder Jerry Remy (Boston), and catcher Buck Martinez (Toronto), re-signed with their 1981 clubs, and the Cardinals purchased pitcher Mike Stanton from the Indians.

In closing, a few other transactions warrant attention. On December 6, the Angels purchased catcher Bob Boone from the Phillies, and five days later, the Dodgers signed former Orioles shortstop Mark Belanger as a free agent. Both players had been very active as members of the Major League Baseball Players Association, and a third player with a high profile in the players union, Orioles third baseman Doug DeCinces, found himself traded to California in late January 1982. It may be argued that Boone had become expendable in Philadelphia with Bo Diaz about to become the Phillies’ backstop. It may also be claimed that Belanger was at the end of his career, and the Orioles were making room for rookie Cal Ripken Jr.; thus, the Phillies and Orioles had little to lose by letting this trio of veterans go. However, the movement of three players prominent in union circles to new addresses may well have been a case in which their former clubs simply chose to rid themselves of some of the reminders of the strike of 1981.  

Summary

The first winter meetings following the devastating midseason strike of 1981 were punctuated by a backlash against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, instigated by a group of owners intent on forcing Kuhn’s resignation. Fueled by dissatisfaction over widespread financial problems besetting the national pastime and the ostensible distance at which the commissioner kept himself during the strike, those seeking Kuhn’s ouster were unsuccessful in their attempt, but the dissent that surfaced in Hollywood, Florida, did not bode well for Kuhn as baseball’s top executive. Trading activity was generally slower than in previous years, but formulation of a deal eventually involving two premier shortstops of the day, Garry Templeton and Ozzie Smith, was set in motion and finally consummated before the opening of spring-training camps in early 1982.         

Sources

Gillette, Gary, and Pete Palmer, eds. The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition (New York: Sterling Publishing Company, 2007).

Kuhn, Bowie. Hardball: The Education of a Baseball Commissioner (New York: Times Books, 1987).

Miller, Marvin.  A Whole Different Ball Game: The Sport and Business of Baseball (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1991).  

Siegel, Barry, ed.  Official 1982 Baseball Register (St. Louis: The Sporting News, 1982).

The Baseball Encyclopedia, Ninth Edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993).

Wigge, Larry, Carl Clark, Dave Sloan, Craig Carter, and Barry Siegel, eds. Official 1982 Baseball Guide (St. Louis: The Sporting News, 1982).

Notes

1 “Kuhn Says Baseball Lost $25 Million in 1980,” Washington Post, December 8, 1981: C1; Bowie Kuhn, Hardball: The Education of a Baseball Commissioner (New York: Times Books, 1987), 362.

2 Jerome Holtzman, “Owners Discuss Sharing Income,” Chicago Tribune, December 6, 1981: C5.

3 Bart Barnes, “Kuhn Hits Cable TV,” Washington Post, December 10, 1981: D1.

4 Dave Nightingale, “Chances Dim for 3-Division Play,” The Sporting News, December 12, 1981: 45.

5 Referring to a gathering of National League executives in October, O’Malley said, “I could have sworn I saw at least five hands in the air (in opposition to three-division play) at the National League meeting in Arizona.” See Dave Nightingale, “Chances Dim for 3-Division Play,” The Sporting News, December 12, 1981: 39.  

6 “Chances Dim for 3-Division Play.”

7 Clifford Kachline, “Baseball Takes Lumps, Survives Stormy, Strike-Plagued Season,” in Larry Wigge, Carl Clark, Dave Sloan, Craig Carter, Barry Siegel, eds., Official 1982 Baseball Guide (St. Louis: The Sporting News, 1982), 25.  

8 “Top Minor League Execs Packed Their Parks,” The Sporting News, December 12, 1981: 40.

9 Kuhn, 366. 

10 Joseph Durso, “Attack on Kuhn Shook Baseball Talks,” New York Times, December 13, 1981: S3. 

11 Ibid.

12 As Kuhn informed the New York Times, “The commissioner’s powers are mostly restraining. I don’t make labor policy or labor decisions.” See Larry Wigge, Carl Clark, Dave Sloan, Craig Carter, Barry Siegel, eds., Official 1982 Baseball Guide (St. Louis: The Sporting News, 1982), 24.  

13 Kuhn, 10.

14 Mark Heisler, “At Baseball Meetings, There’s a Lot of Talk, Not Much Action,” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1981: G3.

15 Hal Bodley, “Phils Disgusted; Deals Collapse,” The Sporting News, January 2, 1982: 38.

Legal Hoops

Danny Ainge had a no-basketball clause in the contract he signed in 1980 with Toronto. Boston Celtics general manager Red Auerbach admitted to knowing about the Blue Jays clause and the contract, and being notified twice about it. Still, Ainge’s desire to play basketball over baseball landed in the courts. By the beginning of October 1981, a jury decided in favor of Toronto,1 even though Ainge signed his contract without counsel because he was still in college (Ainge became the first athlete to take advantage of an NCAA rule allowing a college athlete to be a pro in another sport.)2  However, the possibility of Ainge’s playing basketball remained, as Judge Lee Gagliardi questioned the situation:3

Gagliardi: “The affidavit filed by Ainge shows that he wants to play basketball, doesn’t it?”

Blue Jays attorney Douglas Parker: “Yes. It says he doesn’t want to play baseball. But the Toronto management’s position is that Ainge gets confused about his future.”

Gagliardi (reportedly smiling): “He’s a college man. And an academic All-America. I think he has a very good idea of what he wants.”

Toronto agreed to continue working on an agreement with Boston, but progress was slow. Rumors spread of Toronto President Peter Bavasi being an obstacle to negotiations, and hopes emerged after Bavasi resigned in late November, citing the need for a greater challenge.4 Pat Gillick, Toronto’s vice president of baseball operations, suggested that Bavasi’s resignation had no impact on the Ainge situation, referring to Toronto’s legal team as the driver of negotiations.5

Ultimately, a deal was reached on November 27, with settlement terms not announced.6

Notes

1 Mike Douchant, “Hands Off Ainge, Jury Tells Celts,” The Sporting News, October 17, 1981: 62.

2 Thomas Boswell, “Danny Ainge: A Singular Figure in a Double Play Ainge: Does He Have the Right Stuff for NBA?,” Washington Post, December 20, 1981: L1.

3 “Hands Off Ainge, Jury Tells Celts.”

4 Enquirer Wires, “Bavasi (Needing a Challenge?) Resigns from Blue Jays,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November 25, 1981: 34.

5 Neil Singelais, “Bavasi Quits Blue Jays; Ainge Dispute Continues: Resignation May Facilitate Deal with Celtics,” Boston Globe, November 25, 1981: 33.

6 Associated Press, “Boston Signs Ainge,” Albuquerque Journal, November 28, 1981: 32.

“It was a great thing the club did in assigning Malzone to scout the Cardinals. He knows just what to look for, and for me it was just great. He tells me what I want to know — how a guy pitches in certain situations, where he likes to pitch.” — Carl Yastrzemski

Bob Gibson told reporters that he expected to do better against the Boston Red Sox than against National League opponents simply because “the Red Sox don’t know me as well.” Yaz admitted as much before the Series began. “I don’t know much about the Cardinals, except for a few exhibitions, but I do know they are a solid team,” he told the Boston Record American‘s Larry Claflin, adding that Frank Malzone had been scouting St. Louis and the team was convening a meeting the day before the Series to discuss their players.

Malzone had played with the Red Sox for 11 years, then closed out his career with the California Angels in 1966. When Boston let him go after the 1965 season, Dick O’Connell told him to call after he finished his playing days. “We’ll have something for you,” O’Connell told their eight-time All-Star third baseman. Malzone wanted to stay in the game and when he came back to Boston after the ’66 season, he called and spoke to Farm Director Neil Mahoney. Malzone worked all year, scouting around New England with area scout Jack Burns, learning the ropes. “He taught me a lot about scouting,” Malzone said.

With the Red Sox still very much in the race, he spent most of September working as an advance scout following the Minnesota Twins. He was on his own. “They needed somebody to go in and watch Minnesota before we played them at the end of the year. I watched them for about 10 days. I was new to scouting and didn’t really know what to expect when I came back. Next thing I know I’m going upstairs to a big meeting with all the wheels — Dick O’Connell, Haywood Sullivan, Dick Williams, Kasko…

“I was sitting at the big table and I just told them what I saw with that Minnesota ballclub, coming off being a player. It was a little different from what scouting is today. There was no computer involved. No numbers involved. It was just flat out: What can a guy do to hurt us? Basically, what it was — just some information that you’d spot, little things that can help you win a ballgame. A scout’s not going to win a ballgame, but he can help win a ballgame. The players are going to win it.

“The way I approached it anyway, I just told them what I saw and the guys I wouldn’t let beat us. There were a couple of guys on the ballclub that were struggling. The big thing was not let the big guy beat you — Harmon Killebrew. I just flat out said it: ‘If I was coaching, I wouldn’t let this guy beat me. He’s done it before. He loves hitting in this ballpark. I wouldn’t let him beat us. If you have to, I would just walk him and pitch to the next guy.’ “

Jim Lonborg took in the advice. The crucial October 1 game was the first time in his career he had beaten the Twins. “I followed my game plan,” he told Fred Ciampa of the Boston Record American after the game. “I kept the ball low, pitched around Killebrew and went to sliders and sinkers when things got rough.”

While he was on the road, there were no phone conversations back to Fenway Park every night. Just the meeting upstairs before the series began, both the final games with the Twins and the World Series with the Cardinals. Malzone was perceptive and he made a good impression on ownership. “Everybody was there. Mr. Yawkey was there. For some unknown reason, he liked what I said. Later on, I heard when I said don’t let Harmon Killebrew beat us, he liked that a lot. He told Dick O’Connell, ‘He’s doing advance work next year.'” 

The Sox then sent Malzone to scout St. Louis, working as a team with area scout Don Lenhardt and Toronto manager Eddie Kasko, available now that his season was over. “They were covering the Cardinals and when I got through with Minnesota, I joined them. It was an assignment I had never done before. When you’re by yourself, and you don’t know what to expect … nobody had really said anything like ‘This is what we want….’ You weren’t going to get that out of Dick Williams, anyway.” It was better working with other scouts, though. Scout Tommy Thomas joined the evaluation process as well. “You could kind of sit down at night and talk about what you saw. We got together in the room and Kasko did the written report.”

Dick Williams was pleased. “Malzone gave us a terrific scouting report on the Twins for the weekend games,” Williams said. “We have a pretty good ‘book’ on St. Louis.”1

The look Malzone had of the Cardinals’ Joe Hoerner helped Yaz. “Pretty good left-hand reliever but everything was sidearm. He had some kind of heart condition and he had trouble raising his arm. I saw he didn’t throw curveballs. All he did was throw two different speeds of his fastball. In and out, move it around, and that’s all he’d do — but he’d get people out. His ball must move pretty good — you can’t see it from the stands. He was their out guy and I followed him every time he came in, in relief. Never threw a breaking ball the whole time. The whole time. When I got back, I told Yastrzemski, he’s not going to throw any breaking balls. Carl always wanted to know every bit of information he could get.

[Hoerner came in to pitch to Yaz in the seventh inning of Game Two. The score was 2-0 and Lonborg had a no-hitter going through six innings. The Red Sox had two runners on base and nobody out. Not having to worry about the curveball gave Yaz an advantage. Bang! Three-run homer, which put the game out of sight, 5-0.]

“I talked to Yaz to tell him all about the different pitchers. ‘What do you think they’re going to throw to me?’ ‘Two guys are not afraid to use their fastball against anybody. Take it from there.’ ‘You’re sure about Joe?’ ‘Yeah, I’m sure about Joe. I have yet to see him throw a breaking ball.’ ‘Well…then I get hit.’ I said, ‘Yaz, come on. You can get out of the way anyway.’ So he did hit a home run off him. He always appreciated what I did.”

After Game Two, Yaz told reporters, “Frank told me exactly how Gibson and Hughes and Hoerner would pitch to me. Malzone could do this because he and I played together for five years and he knew my capabilities. Frank knows, too, how those guys pitch. On the basis of what he told me about the St. Louis pitchers, I have been able to guess with them all the way. That makes it a lot easier when you’re facing a strange pitcher.”

Scouting was, as always, an art — perhaps more so at the time than today. Just as the ’67 Series was coming to a close, Orioles executive Frank Lane warned that asking players to follow scouting reports too closely could backfire. “Scouting reports should be used as a guide. Situations change, and batters often vary their styles during games. Catchers and pitchers should be allowed to think for themselves at times.” Lane wondered if pitchers Gary Bell and Jose Santiago had tried to adhere too closely to scouting reports in Games Three and Four respectively. “Maybe they’re trying to get things down too fine, and they’re not pitching naturally.” At the same time, veteran catcher Elston Howard revealed that he had been urging rookie right-handed reliever Gary Waslewski not to over-anticipate. “I’m trying to caution Gary not to think about the game. I told him not to worry himself about how he should pitch to Orlando Cepeda, or what he should throw to Lou Brock. I told him to just get the ball over the plate, and let me worry about what to throw. I’m not right all the time. I realize that. But I’ve been in nine of these things and Gary’s just a rookie.”2

For the next 28 years, Frank worked in advance scouting for the Red Sox. He’s seen a lot of changes, and wishes he’d had some of the tools players have today. Although Dick Williams just began to use video that spring for instructional purposes, it was not used anywhere near the way it is today, when some clubs are beginning to dispense with scouts in favor of video. “They’ve got videos. They’ve got everything else. I’d love to have had the videos they have today, when I’m playing. We had to keep it in our head. How’d this guy pitch the last time I faced him. Now all they have to do is walk into the other room and look it up. The pitchers can go out and have dinner and not worry about the next game. They can look at an out-take the next day, and they’ve got a guy in the room that picks it right up, the guy in the room there is good at it — Billy Broadbent [Red Sox Video/Advance Scouting Coordinator] — he’s good at picking up the things, and he shows them, OK, two strikes and he tries to throw a fastball by him. Little things like that. Billy’s good at it. Those are things I would like today if I were playing.” 

BILL NOWLIN was one of the first fans to the mound when Jim Lonborg induced the final out and the Red Sox won the 1967 pennant. He was elected as SABR’s Vice President in 2004 and re-elected for five more terms before stepping down in 2016, when he was elected as a Director. He is also the author of dozens of books on the Red Sox or Red Sox players, including “Ted Williams At War” and “Love That Dirty Water: The Standells and the Improbable Victory Anthem of the Boston Red Sox” (both from Rounder Books.) He has written Johnny Pesky’s biography (Mr. Red Sox) and co-edited a series of Red Sox “team books” written by numerous SABR authors that focus on different years when the Red Sox fielded exceptional teams, including: ‘”75: The Red Sox Team that Saved Baseball” (2005); “The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox” (2007); “When Boston Had The Babe: The 1918 Red Sox” (2008); and “Lefty, Double-X, and The Kid: The 1939 Red Sox, a Team in Transition” (2009). He is also co-founder of Rounder Records of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’s traveled to more than 100 countries, but says there’s no place like Fenway Park.

Sources

Interviews with Frank Malzone on October 4 and 15, 2006 by Bill Nowlin.

Notes

We can remember 1966 as the year when Earl Wilson was turned away from the Cloud Nine bar in Winter Haven because of the color of his skin. He’d been playing pool with Dennis Bennett and Dave Morehead, and they crossed the street to get a beer at Cloud Nine where Wilson was denied service. All three left. Wilson was denied entry to another establishment as well. It made the front page of the Boston Globe in February, and Red Sox manager Billy Herman said, “Any place which is not suitable for one of our players is in turn unsuitable for all of our players.” GM Dick O’Connell was embarrassed because he had just brought the Red Sox back to the Grapefruit League after six years of spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona. He’d been assured by Winter Haven that there would be no racial difficulties.

Some days later, Herman was asked about players drinking. A reporter asked him directly, “Are the Red Sox down here to train to play baseball — or are they down here to drink?” That wouldn’t be a Boston reporter trying to stir up a little trouble, would it? Herman’s response might not have set the tone the Red Sox wanted to convey, but was forthright and likely reflected one of the legacies of the Yawkey/Higgins years. “I don’t care if a player of mine has a drink,” said Herman, who’d been known to sock away a few himself from time to time. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he added. So, he was asked, you don’t have any objection to players drinking, either in spring training or during the regular season? “No, I haven’t,” he replied. “All I demand is that they get in shape — and keep in shape — to play baseball. If a player has a drink one night and plays ball well the next day, that’s all right with me. It’s all right, in moderation. In fact, if I meet one of my players in a bar, I’ll buy him a drink.” A short while later, Herman also volunteered, “There have been some pretty good ballplayers who have been drinkers.” It would be understandable if some interpreted this as not exactly discouraging drink.

Another day, another quote. Herman later remarked, “I’ll let the players decide themselves if they’ll have a curfew this year.” Herman, in the words of Bill Ballou, was “a member of baseball’s old guard and a manager built for comfort, not speed.”

After the ’66 season was over, it didn’t take long for O’Connell to make a move. Herman had already been relieved as manager on September 9, and Dick Williams was hired for 1967 on September 28, the very day after Boston’s season ended. VP Haywood Sullivan made it evident there would be some changes made. On October 3, he said there were no untouchables on the Red Sox, and that the only “Untouchables” were Elliot Ness and company on the old TV show of the same name. “There are men the ball club would like to keep,” Sullivan said, “but if some outfit is in a frenzy to make a deal, then anyone can go.” That wasn’t exactly earth-shaking news; baseball executives had uttered similar words for years. What was startling, though, was the September 29 headline from Dick Williams’ first day on the job: “Williams Strips Yaz of Red Sox Captaincy.” It wasn’t meant to demean the former Captain Carl but it was clearly intended to send a message. With him and his four coaches, he said, “There are five chiefs around, and no need for any more. I don’t see any need of having another chief on the team.”

Williams was asked if he realized he might need to be a bit of a baby-sitter on a team often accused of having a bit of a country club atmosphere. His no-nonsense reply: “There are some players who need a slap on the back, and others who need a slap somewhere else.” He said he’d immediately tell a player if he was messing up, “but I will not have these team meetings unless it means cutting up money for first division spots.” Williams had been given only a one-year contract and columnist Bud Collins said reporters had already begun a pool betting to see how long he’d last. “I consider this a challenge,” Williams said. Collins picked up on that bit of understatement: “A challenge? This job is no more of a challenge than Premier Ky has in Saigon or Daniel had in that Babylonian zoo, or Eddie Fisher had with Liz Taylor.” Veteran Globe scribe Harold Kaese’s column bore the headline “Williams’ Nerve Could Be Asset.”

Kaese saw real improvement over the 1965 ballclub, and so had the 150,000 additional fans filling more seats at Fenway. In a September 19 column in the Globe, the morning after the last home game. Kaese noted that their 40-41 home record was a six-game improvement. There had been player turnover, and it had been for the better. The roster on 1966’s final Fenway game had only nine players who’d been with the team a year earlier. They’d kept Yaz and Rico and Tony C, of course, but added George Scott, Joe Foy, and Mike Ryan — bringing youth to some positions. The pitching was looking better as well.

The Sox lost five of its last eight games, though, and it was a fight for the finish — to see which team of four would end up in the cellar. Bud Collins discussed the reverse pennant race — the Dungeon Derby — he called it, in effect assigning a negative magic number for the rights to 10th place. Boston’s season ended earlier than the other three teams. When Boston was all done, they would have to wait out the remaining games for Washington (one more), Kansas City (three more), and New York (four more games to play after the Red Sox were done.) No doubt it would be “sheer agony…torture” and they would have to “chain-smoke their way through Sunday helplessly as the other contenders decide their fate.” As events transpired, even though the Yankees won four of their last five, it wasn’t quite enough. They’d played three fewer games than the Red Sox, and while the Sox had lost one more game than New York, they’d won two more. That put them at a .444 winning percentage while New York was at .440, 26 1/2 games out to Boston’s 26. New York had earned sole possession of the cellar.

Dick Williams had played on the Red Sox team in 1963 and 1964; he wasn’t that much older than many of the players and would now be managing some of his recent teammates. But he earned their respect. Bobby Doerr was named to Williams’ coaching staff and admired the new manager. “There’s something in Dick’s voice, his way. When he says, ‘Be at the park at 9 o’clock,’ you know you’d better be there. He doesn’t have to rant and rave. There’s no falseness about him. Players soon sense falseness in a manager. Managing is like hitting — you either have it or you don’t. Williams has it. There’s no tension on his club [referring to Toronto], but he has the authority. The players respect him.”

When new Boston Red Sox manager Dick Williams faced the press corps during spring training at Winter Haven, Florida, in March 1967, they had no idea what an amazing ride they were all about to take. (BOSTON HERALD)

Postseason roster moves in October 1966 saw the Red Sox cut eight players including Lennie Green, Dick Stigman, and Billy Short. Eddie Kasko was cut but took over for Williams as manager in Toronto. Haywood Sullivan “admitted that hopes for a trade of major proportions were not good” — Boston Globe. Sullivan said, “Frankly, I don’t think we’re going to be trading much this winter. Most of the people now on our roster are young, and you don’t want to trade for someone until you know for sure what he can do, or can’t do.” Promoted to the major-league roster were: Billy Conigliaro, Russ Gibson, Ken Poulsen, and five pitchers: Gary Waslewski, Rob Snow, Mark Schaeffer, Dick Baney, and Billy Farmer.

In late November, Dick Williams said he was happy enough with the hand he’d been dealt: “You think it would be funny if a ninth place team stood pat, don’t you? It could happen. I like my team.” Williams went on to say that he would not tolerate any interference from above, but that he’d managed in the organization for two years already “and I’ve had complete freedom.” If there were interference? “The first time it happens, I’ll pack my bags and go home.”

In January, Williams laughed about his television activities — he’d appeared on “Hollywood Squares” and broke the bank. It came two years after he’d won more money than any male contestant on the show “You Don’t Say.” He was unhesitating when asked what would be his biggest problem: “Making them play as a team, as a unit,” he told Will McDonough. “Our people have got to forget about individual statistics.” After a couple of other comments, he added, “To be perfectly honest, I don’t want any of the players to love me. I don’t care if they all dislike me. We’ll all get along great if they do just what I ask. If they don’t, then I’ll rip them good.” A full month before pitchers and catchers were due to report, Williams didn’t engage in any false platitudes about how everyone would have a chance to make the ballclub. He said he could pretty much name his starting position players — and then proceeded to do so: Foy at third, Rico at short, Mike Andrews at second, and a fight between Tony Horton and George Scott for first base. “I think the competition will be good for Scott,” he added, likely tipping his hand a bit as to his motivation in setting up a contest at first. Yaz would play left field, Reggie Smith in center, and Conigliaro in right. The only other position up for grabs was catcher: Mike Ryan, Bob Tillman, and Russ Gibson were all in the mix. The pitchers would be Lonborg, José Santiago, Darrell Brandon, and Lee Stange, with John Wyatt and Don McMahon in the bullpen. That left a few spots open for pitchers on the team. Waslewski and Rohr he knew from Toronto, and Pete Magrini. Bennett, Morehead, Charton, and Stephenson would all have an equal shot.

In late January, O’Connell had said that Tom Yawkey wanted a “fiery manager.” O’Connell denied Yawkey was selling the team. “He’s never been more interested in his team.” It appears Yawkey had found a fiery manager, or at least O’Connell had. At the Baseball Writers dinner on January 26, Harry Dalton (Orioles), Gabe Paul (Indians), Ralph Houk (Yankees), Joe Cronin (AL), and a number of Red Sox executives all talked about how much better the Boston club was going to be. There were signs there.

Not only had O’Connell found the man he wanted, but he began to introduce a number of innovations. One was what Will McDonough dubbed an “instant critic” — a videotape replay machine. The purchase was announced on February 7, a $3,000 Sony unit that would be used to record both pitchers and hitters so that coaches could sit with the players and evaluate what they were doing right or wrong. Such machines had been used in golf and pro football but, McDonough wrote, “To the Red Sox knowledge, no one has ever attempted to use TV replay in baseball as a technical instructor.” The regular photographer for the Red Sox, Jerry Buckley, had begun taking lessons in January as to how to operate the unit which was to be set up in Winter Haven. Player reaction was generally favorable.

Sullivan also shelled out a modest $175 to buy a batting machine constructed by Joe Torre’s brother Frank. “It looks like a good machine,” Sullivan said. “If they’d had something like this around when I was a player I might have batted .200 in the major leagues.” (The self-effacing Sullivan may have mis-remembered his own stats; his career average was .226.)

One other new ingredient the Red Sox had was the BoSox Club. The fan booster club concept was brought to Boston by Ken Coleman, inspired by Cleveland’s Wahoo Club. Dom DiMaggio became the first president of the BoSox Club when it formed in 1966 and it boasted about 200 members by Opening Day.

Some of the players were a little late returning their contracts, as Clif Keane noted on Valentine’s Day. Six player contracts had arrived, but not Andrews, Demeter, Gibson, Horton, Jones, Petrocelli, Ryan, Smith, Stephenson, Thomas, Waslewski or Yastrzemski. “Can you imagine having 12 holdouts on a ninth place team?” asked Keane. As to Stephenson in particular, Keane added, “He has exactly three big league wins posted in the five years he has been with the club. How a guy holds out under those conditions — well, as we said, Haywood has a very clever way of expressing himself, so he’ll probably have Stevie under contract.” Sullivan remarked, “I’m really not too worried. I don’t mind too much getting their letters, and answering them. It’s a little fun.” By the 27th, only Horton was outside the fold.

A week before camp opened, the spotlight was being readied for Dick Williams to be put under. After Dick O’Connell had relieved manager Billy Herman of his duties in September, he’d said of Herman, “He ran a bad spring training.” The Sox had finished last, with an 8-19 record but little of spring training had been reported to the Boston fan base because of the month-long newspaper strike that covered most of the month of March.

Williams elected not to let the players decide whether or not they felt like having a curfew. In a team meeting on the first day of camp, February 25, he told them that there would be a 12:30 a.m. curfew, and he told them they had to keep their weight down, too. Both the regimen and curfew would last through the season: “I’m not looking to get the men in shape and then have them dissipate the rest of the year.” He installed a weight chart in front of the manager’s dressing room. The weight issue would result in occasional benchings of players during the season, but should have come as no surprise. Williams had “started managing even before players arrived at Winter Haven” by sending letters to each player, telling each of them what weight he and trainer Buddy Leroux had determined was their optimal weight and what weight they should be when they reported.1 Williams was consistent. A month earlier, he’d said, “There’s not going to be a Gestapo, by any means. Sure, I’ll have a curfew. I had one at Toronto. But I think I checked once in two years. I don’t think a manager has to be watching. He can tell by the way the players perform if they’re getting the proper rest.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Dennis “The Menace” Bennett was the first player to break a rule. Two days later, he showed up 25 minutes late for a workout, bringing along roomie Bob Sadowski. Williams said, “I told the two men that the next time there might be some fine with it. And they missed a lot of sliding work Monday, so they’ll do it today. After all, I wouldn’t say they are sure of their jobs.”

In March, Dick O’Connell mentioned that season ticket sales had increased 40% over the previous year, which isn’t saying much but an indication that the new look of the club, the youth, and the manager (himself not all that old) were giving fans something to hope for — maybe that they’d win more than they’d lose.

Williams liked two of the young pitchers he’d had in Toronto. He said he didn’t plan to keep Billy Rohr around the big league park when what he really needed was to get more innings. Mace Brown had worked with Rohr in instructional league. He said of Williams, “I know he doesn’t intend to carry Rohr unless he is working regularly. But I say there is a chance he will work in a rotation. He’s no Grove, but I sort of like him.” Williams added, “He’s far and away the best prospect we have in the organization. There may be some doubts about his strength. I’ll have to watch for that. He’s a skinny kid. But I like to think I have a big league pitcher in Rohr.” Of Gary Waslewski, Mace Brown said, “He’s the best of the new righthanders. He may need another pitch and his best bet is a curve.” Williams said that Waslewski had a tendency to coast, and that he’d almost sent him down from Toronto in 1966, but he had really come around and pitched well the second half of the season. There was, he added, no one better at holding runners on base.

There were some of the usual communications issues — Sullivan said he’d not heard from Horton about his contract — but then learned that O’Connell had already called Horton and worked it out. “I wouldn’t have called him,” Haywood said. “He would have stayed in California if he didn’t call me.” Yaz said that O’Connell had promised him he would not be traded. “It’s the first I’ve heard about it,” said Sullivan.

As the exhibition season got underway, Williams felt he needed a little steadying influence in the infield so he turned to Petrocelli. “He’s an intelligent ballplayer and I want him to have some authority out there…I told him I wanted him to take over in tight spots.” It wasn’t the same thing as naming him “captain” but the Globe used the word albeit it in quotation marks in its March 4 headline.

Several Red Sox veterans came out to help tutor the team. Doerr was a coach, of course, but Dom DiMaggio came to camp to work with center fielder Reggie Smith. George Smith tore a knee ligament while practicing rundown plays on March 5. Smith had been the starting second baseman in 1966, but now he’d been penciled in to back up Petrocelli at short. The injury looked to keep him out for eight weeks. As it happened, he never appeared in another major-league game.

Pitching coach Sal Maglie’s wife Kay had been seriously ill with cancer for quite some time. When she died, Sal went to Buffalo for the funeral, made arrangements for their two children, and returned to camp on the 5th. And Ted Williams came in to help with the hitters the next day.

On the same day, March 6, Dick Williams did something unusual: he put on umpire’s gear and worked behind the plate for the first intrasquad game, all the better to judge both pitchers and batters. Williams worked the plate on a number of occasions. He also made use of the videotape equipment supplied by GM O’Connell.

Conigliaro was ready. He wanted to hit cleanup. “I want the pressure of batting fourth,” he said, while Yaz was said to have told Dick Williams back on the second day of camp that he was no troublemaker. The two had played together on the Red Sox just a few years earlier. Williams had needled Yaz once, saying, “You run the bases just like Jackie Robinson, only you get caught.” It was hard for Yaz to take it in stride, and he asked to see Williams. “I told him I had the reputation of not getting along with managers and I didn’t want him to think I was that way,” Yaz told Clif Keane.

Ray Fitzgerald wrote in the March 9 Globe that Sox management thought Lonborg could become a 20-game winner, and “So does Jim Lonborg. A year ago he didn’t…In 1966…when he was good, he was very, very good, but when he was bad — Disaster City.” Lonborg wanted to be in the regular rotation, and start every fourth day, and believed his control was much better. He had more confidence in his ability to keep the ball low. Sal Maglie was working with him on a changeup but the main thing in Lonborg’s favor was his self-confidence.

The first game of the exhibition season was at Payne Park, Sarasota on March 10. Conigliaro hit a home run, even though the White Sox won the game, 8-3. Dennis Bennett took the loss, giving up four runs in three innings pitched. Reggie Smith made two throwing errors. The following day, George Thomas’ solo home run in the top of the ninth inning broke a tie game against Kansas City. Ted Williams proclaimed Reggie Smith the best prospect in years, including both Yaz and Tony C.

On March 12, Doerr said that one player he wouldn’t trade was Tony Horton, saying that he was in a class with Harmon Killebrew. Maybe he wouldn’t hit as many homers, but Doerr predicted he’d hit between 30 and 35. The trouble was, Horton was limited to first base, though, and Scott was the best fielder so it wasn’t going to be easy to take the Boomer off the bag and stick him somewhere else.

On March 14, Conig hit a homer and two doubles, though the Red Sox lost to the White Sox, 5-4. Williams was “seething,” according to Ken Coleman, when Tony Horton overran second base and was tagged out. It was another example of Williams treating an exhibition game as if it were the real thing.

Several pitching arms were of concern. Some were sore, others needed more work. This was spring training, after all. That’s part of what it’s all about. But Williams wasn’t all that forgiving. When Jerry Stephenson walked the first three Yankees in the bottom of the first during a game at Fort Lauderdale, he told reporters that Jerry had better learn how to stay loose if he was going to pitch up north. Williams continued to ride George Scott. Asked if Scott was any better at laying off low pitches, Williams said, “Yes. He’s improved slightly. At least now he waits until they come up to his shins.”2

The next day, on the 16th, the Globe said “the only man who looked like a pitcher was Darrell Brandon” in a slugfest as the Red Sox beat the Mets coming from behind with a 10-run ninth inning — a game that both Yaz and Conig sat out. The Red Sox batters collected 23 hits and earned 13 walks. The final score was Red Sox 23, Mets 18.

Meanwhile, Williams was working with baserunners on speed. In a 7-5 loss to Cincinnati, he was pleased because they’d stolen four bases, with two of those coming on a double steal. “We’ve had speed on the club before,” Williams said. “But have never used it. We’ve always waited for the wall. Now we’re going to use our speed. The home runs will come anyhow.”

Tony Conigliaro was hit by a John Wyatt batting practice pitch before the March 18 game and suffered a fractured shoulder blade. The Sox anxiously awaited word from X-rays taken back in Boston — was it a hairline fracture, in which case he’d just miss a couple of weeks, or was it a compound fracture which would probably cost him the season? Fortunately, this time, it was a minor injury to the scapula. It was, though, the fifth time that Conigliaro had suffered a broken bone when hit by a pitch. He clearly crowded the plate more than he probably should. Dennis Bennett had a good day, throwing five hitless innings against Detroit.

On the 19th, Dave Morehead was sent to Boston’s Toronto farm club, along with Bob Sadowski, Jerry Moses, and Pete Magrini. The day’s game ended oddly as Detroit’s Dave Wickersham had the bases loaded and induced a bunt popup from Bob Tillman that sailed 15 feet into the air — and then he unaccountably stepped back and let the ball drop, allowing the Red Sox to complete a come-from-behind win in the ninth inning. “I don’t know why,” he said after the game. The game also featured some uncharacteristic play, aside from the nearly-botched squeeze that won the game: there was a double steal and a couple of hit-and-run plays with a baserunner on second. Rather than being pleased, Williams groused about the four Red Sox errors. As a team, the Red Sox were hitting well over .300.

The Sox were trying to see if they could get Tony Horton more playing time, and so asked George Scott to play some in right field. Scott wasn’t at all pleased, insisting that he was a first baseman, not a right fielder. The Globe sports page featured a headline in the March 23 paper: “Red Sox Willing to Trade Scott.” The article said that Jose Santiago was trade bait, too. Both Santiago and Scott, plus Garry Roggenburk, were placed on waivers to see what interest might be generated. Will McDonough acknowledged that sometimes being listed on the waiver wire was just a way to “shake up a player.” With Scott grumbling at battling Tony Horton for the first base slot, it may have just been a ploy to shake up Scott. Weird things have happened with waiver wires. In late September the year before, just before being fired, McDonough wrote, “Billy Herman put the ENTIRE team on waivers.” Only four were claimed by other clubs, and all four were withdrawn. Since he was the one sent packing, Herman never had the opportunity to follow up on the interest expressed in the four who’d been claimed, and explore any trade possibilities.

The very day the “Red Sox Willing to Trade Scott” headline ran, Scott was indeed playing right field and ran back deep, slamming into the right field wall which was inconveniently made of cinder block. He suffered a concussion, and was expected to be out five or six days. McDonough commented: “Playing a foreign position — right field — Scott temporarily misjudged the ball. In his haste to adjust, he ran smack into the wall.” He was knocked out for over a minute. Mike Andrews joked, “He moved the wall from 330 feet to 332.”3 X-rays of Scott’s jaw and wrist proved negative, but he was kept in the hospital overnight for evaluation. Williams said that Scott would continue to play the outfield, but he would move him to the easier-to-judge-a-fly left field.

Lucky 7’s: Reggie Smith and Dominic DiMaggio. In 1967 with the Boston Red Sox, Dom gave rookie Reggie a number of spring training suggestions on how to improve his center field play. (BOSTON HERALD)

A week later, in the March 26 and 27 issues of the Globe, Harold Kaese penned a two-part series on Dick Williams. More important than questions about whether rookies Reggie Smith or Mike Andrews would produce as regulars was the question whether the Red Sox had a good manager in Dick Williams. He concluded, “The early returns are in and favorable.” He had his players hitting, but also running, bunting, and thinking. The manager who called himself the “wrong Williams” (alluding to Ted) “is neither magnetic nor easy to warm up to. But he is aggressive, scrappy, cocky and terrier-tough…Williams belongs to the Society of the Under-Rated.” He believes in hard work, condition, fundamentals, Kaese wrote, and he ran long drills, emphasizing that players work on the mistakes they made the day before. He had them playing what even before the DH rule came in was considered a little bit of “National League baseball,” featuring “surprise and subtlety.” Kaese approved. The “Williams trend is exciting,” he wrote. “As never before under Yawkey’s ownership, Williams has the Sox hit-and-running, bunt-and-running, hitting behind the runner, stealing and squeezing. The players have responded. Fancy Red Sox hitters giving themselves up by purposely hitting to right to advance a runner from second to third. Williams has restored the long-missing element of surprise to the attack.”

Self-deprecatingly, Williams laughed about one aspect of his conditioning program: “Maybe all we’ll end up with is the best volleyball team in Florida.”

It was Kaese’s column on March 27 that carried Williams’ prediction: “I honestly believe we’ll win more games than we lose.” It was one he uttered on several occasions. “I think we can beat five teams anyhow, and if that puts us in the first division, I guess that’s where we’ll be.” Kaese’s piece was optimistic, but concluded, “Williams is quick, determined, intelligent, but how he eventually makes out as a big league manager and as a volunteer for that hornet’s nest at Fenway Park probably will depend on how much iron he has in his makeup. I think he may have enough, but I’m not sure.”

Mike Andrews developed a bit of a bad back, pulling some muscles and re-aggravating an injury he’d apparently suffered lifting weights in the offseason; Williams put Reggie Smith in to play some games at second base. Smith started the regular season at second. Williams was more worried about his pitching than anything. The staff had a 3.92 ERA in 1966, but improved to 3.36 in 1967.

Near the end of the month, on the 28th, Williams picked George Scott as his first baseman. The team was to embark on a trip to the Virgin Islands for a couple of games and Williams was ready to go with a set lineup that included Boomer. With Andrews still out, Reggie Smith would play second with Jose Tartabull and George Thomas platooning in center. It was looking like Mike Ryan had the edge as the first-string catcher.

Yaz was in the midst of his best spring season yet, and March 29 saw him excel, hitting two homers, driving in six runs, and making what Will McDonough described as “three outstanding catches including the game-saver in the ninth inning.” The Red Sox took that one from the Cardinals at St. Petersburg, 10-9.

The next day, Boston got some excellent pitching and beat the Orioles 1-0, Lee Stange and Hank Fischer combining to give up just three singles. Stange retired the last 13 batters he faced. Tony C. was back in his first game since fracturing his shoulder, and doubled in the game’s lone run in the sixth. In the very same game, Yaz was hit on the hand by a Steve Barber fastball. Fortunately, x-rays were negative.

March 31 saw the Boston Red Sox playing baseball at St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, before some 4,100 islanders who watched the game played on a cricket pitch that had been converted to a baseball field for the occasion. The Sox lost to Mel Stottlemyre of the Yankees, 3-1, as Stottlemyre threw seven full innings, giving up just two hits while striking out seven. He was facing the lineup Dick Williams had determined would be his Opening Day lineup. Lonborg gave up two runs in his seven innings, and took the loss.

The next day, the two teams squared off again, this time at St. Thomas, and this time the Red Sox won, 13-4, with Yaz (five RBIs), Rico, and Tartabull each hitting homers. Dennis Bennett was scheduled to start but was hit in the shin by a John Wyatt fastball and would have x-rays taken. That was the second pitch of the spring that Wyatt had unleashed and injured a teammate.

Playing second base didn’t faze Reggie Smith. Filling in for five games, he played errorless ball and hit .360 during the stretch. The experience served him in good stead; he played the first six games of the regular season at second. On April 2, Reggie doubled and homered. George Scott, playing both first base and also third base, homered as well. Rohr and Galen Cisco each gave up one run and the Red Sox beat the Mets, 8-2. The Sox had started slowly in spring training, but now had won nine of their last 14 games. What was the difference between this Red Sox team and the one he’d played on in ’63 and ’64? “The difference is that this is a ‘Team’,” Williams said. “I’m not one for past history, but I know when I was around here before it was an individual thing. I feel that one thing that has been overlooked about us this spring is the way that the players are playing for one another rather than themselves individually.”

Williams didn’t hesitate to get on a player if he felt it was called for. When the Pirates beat Boston 3-1 at Ft. Myers, Boston’s manager was livid. After Dennis Bennett had given up a triple that cost the Red Sox the lead, Williams gave him a “tongue-lashing” right on the mound. “I told him that it was a lousy pitch — and besides that, he should have been backing up third base on the play…My little boy could have handled that pitch.” Bennett had to agree it was a pretty poor pitch. One mistake in a meaningless exhibition game and Williams explodes? It wasn’t any big deal, was it? To Dick Williams, it was. Carl Yastrzemski, showing some team spirit, took some of the blame on himself for letting the ball get by him in the field.

The “other Williams” — Ted Williams — officially a VP at the time, kept a low profile in Winter Haven, but spoke out himself on at least one occasion. One day, he simply wasn’t there and Harold Kaese murmured Ted had a “relatively insignificant status” in camp; he noted that Ted didn’t hang around long. This Williams was back a few days later, though, criticizing Tony C. on April 5 for bunting in a two-out situation with Yaz on first in a scoreless game. He popped up, but the point — Ted said — was “we want the big hit and Tony’s capable of giving it to us. Instead he pops up to the pitcher. That’s evidence of poor thinking. That’s exactly how not to win games. Tony should know better.” Ted’s philosophy may have differed from that of the “wrong Williams,” but in this situation he might have been right.

In the final roster cut of spring training, Jerry Stephenson, Gary Waslewski, and reserve infielder Al Lehrer were sent to Toronto. That put the Red Sox one man under what was then the 28-player limit. They could have held onto at least one of them, but felt it was better to get them more regular work in the minors.

Though he’d been quoted along the same lines in Harold Kaese’s column a couple of weeks earlier, it was when he spoke to the press corps on April 7 that he made his famous prediction: “We’ll win more games than we lose this year.” McDonough wrote that, despite a strong spring season, most experts were picking the Sox for ninth place once again. After the final team meeting of the spring, Williams said he had told the players that they had given him 100% in spring training and if they kept it up during the regular season, they wouldn’t have any problems from him.

Ken Coleman later characterized spring training 1967, saying of Williams that he “ran more of a boot camp than a spring training, especially when compared to his predecessors. He insisted that every player be on time, put in a hard day’s work, not complain, and be there the next day for more. He wasn’t interested in discussion or debate with his players. There was one chief in camp, and it was Williams. Dick and his coaches installed a precise schedule for workouts: each player knew where he had to be and what he had to be doing at all times. When nothing formal was scheduled, a played was expected to run or participate in volleyball games.” Apparently, it worked. Coleman said, “Many grumbled, and a few made the mistake of doing it publicly; but no one actually challenged Williams. And so a funny thing happened on the way to the ball park — this unconnected bunch of young men developed into a spirited team who fighting character reflected that of their manager.”4

On April 9, the Globe published a story by Will McDonough evaluating each of the key Red Sox players. The story was accompanied by a chart showing how the Globe writers picked the race. Kaese, Clif Keane, and John Ahern picked Boston to finish sixth. McDonough and Ray Fitzgerald saw a seventh-place finish, and Roger Birtwell had them finishing eighth. Not one bought into the first-division optimism.

McDonough saw Yaz as in the best shape of his career, and noted that Tony C., hitting over .400 all spring could have the best season of his career, if he could “remain free from injury.” George Scott was the best-fielding first baseman in the league and was hitting about .300 in the springtime. Williams worried he’d backslide during the season, and “assigned coach Eddie Popowski to keep after Scott constantly.” With Andrews still unavailable, Reggie Smith was the second baseman. Though not as strong defensively, he would wield a good bat, as would Rico at short. Joe Foy was more of a worry, though he had potential: “Foy may be the best player on the team.” Tartabull and Thomas would platoon in center, Tartabull better all around but Thomas having the better arm. Mike Ryan still had first claim on the catcher’s slot, the strongest defensively among the trio of Boston backstops, but Russ Gibson or Bob Tillman would get called on if he was too anemic with the bat. Lonborg was first on a pitching staff still not seen as particularly strong. At least the staff seemed to be healthy. Brandon, Rohr, and Bennett were the initial rotation. Stange, Santiago, and Fischer weren’t far behind the quartet, and could be called in as necessary.

On April 9, the Red Sox lost the final spring training game to the Tigers, 4-3 in the 10th inning, but the Sox nevertheless won more than they lost during Grapefruit League play, by one game: they had a 14-13 record. Tony Conigliaro led the team in hitting with a .405 spring average. Mike Andrews was second at .395, and Scott third at an even .333. Reggie Smith and Jose Tartabull both hit over .300. Yaz hit just .257 but tied for the team lead with Petrocelli (.247) with five home runs each. Yaz led the team with 15 RBIs. Williams thought the Red Sox had the best outfield in the American League. The Red Sox were ready.

Clif Keane’s front page story on April 11 was headlined “Sox Open With Hope, High Praise.” The temperature at Fenway Park that day was 35 degrees, with winds gusting to 40 mph. The game was postponed due to cold. The Yankees won their game in Washington, though, and took first place. The second attempt found temperatures had risen to 46 degrees and the gusts had moderated to just 20 mph. The game went on. Some 8,324 fans braved the conditions and saw Boston beat Chicago, 5-4. Feature columnist Diane White wrote a front page story in the Globe, which bore the headline “Red Sox Win, Optimism Runs Rampant.” White cited a good omen: the “Lady in Red” was back. Though a dedicated fan of long tenure, Mrs. Carter S. Knight of Peabody had declined to come to Opening Day in 1965 or 1966 because she was “disgusted with their half-hearted performance.” But she was giving the new-look team a chance: “I like Dick Williams’ style of play. They really look better under the new leadership.”

So they did.

BILL NOWLIN was one of the first fans to the mound when Jim Lonborg induced the final out and the Red Sox won the 1967 pennant. He was elected as SABR’s Vice President in 2004 and re-elected for five more terms before stepping down in 2016, when he was elected as a Director. He is also the author of dozens of books on the Red Sox or Red Sox players, including “Ted Williams At War” and “Love That Dirty Water: The Standells and the Improbable Victory Anthem of the Boston Red Sox” (both from Rounder Books.) He has written Johnny Pesky’s biography (Mr. Red Sox) and co-edited a series of Red Sox “team books” written by numerous SABR authors that focus on different years when the Red Sox fielded exceptional teams, including: ‘”75: The Red Sox Team that Saved Baseball” (2005); “The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox” (2007); “When Boston Had The Babe: The 1918 Red Sox” (2008); and “Lefty, Double-X, and The Kid: The 1939 Red Sox, a Team in Transition” (2009). He is also co-founder of Rounder Records of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’s traveled to more than 100 countries, but says there’s no place like Fenway Park.

Sources

All quotations taken from the Boston Globe, except as noted.

Notes

The majority of Chicago-set baseball films have included (and occasionally showcased) the Cubs. Among them are Joe E. Brown’s Elmer, the Great (1933) and Alibi Ike (1935), the Grover Cleveland Alexander biopic The Winning Team (1952), the Dizzy Dean biopic The Pride of St. Louis (1952), and the family comedy-fantasy Rookie of the Year (1993). Sometimes, a fictional Chicago club is depicted. One example is Boulevardier from the Bronx (1936), an eight-minute Warner Bros. cartoon featuring the exploits of the Chicago Giants, whose star pitcher—a rooster—is named Dizzy Dan. (At the time, Dizzy Dean still was pitching in St. Louis; he did not join the Cubs until 1938.)

The town’s other big league nine has not been completely shut out onscreen. But it should surprise no one that two of the highest-profile Chisox films spotlight the Black Sox Scandal, and are worth comparing because they offer vastly different points of view. Eight Men Out (1988), based on the Eliot Asinof book, is one movie about baseball history that does not glorify its subjects. The Sox are portrayed in ensemble style as a rowdy, hard-playing bunch, easily the best major league team of the era. As depicted by director-writer John Sayles, however, they are also victims, oppressed as much by jowly Charles “The Old Roman” Comiskey (Clifton James), the team’s penny-pinching owner, as by underworld kingpin Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner).

Meanwhile, Field of Dreams (1989), adapted from W.P. Kinsella’s novel, deals with the Black Sox from a wholly different perspective. Field of Dreams is the It’s a Wonderful Life of baseball movies, a wistful fantasy about love, hope, and the timelessness of the game. Here, the defamed ballplayers are restored to their glory when their spirits come to play in an eternal, pastoral ball field. Their sins are not dramatized and, consequently, an idealized vision of American innocence is recaptured.

Eight Men Out is deeply cynical. At one point, Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) observes: “I always figured it was talent made a man big, you know. … I mean, we’re the guys they come to see. Without us, there ain’t a ballgame … but look at who’s holding the money and look at who’s facing a jail cell. Talent don’t mean nothing.” A heckler yells at Shoeless Joe: “Hey, Jackson! Can you spell ‘cat’?” Jackson (D.B. Sweeney) retorts: “Hey, Mister! Can you spell ‘shit’?”

In the nostalgia-tinged Field of Dreams, however, Shoeless Joe (Ray Liotta) utters “Man, I did love this game. I’d have played for food money” and “I used to love traveling on the trains from town to town. The hotels … brass spittoons in the lobbies, brass beds in the rooms. It was the crowd, rising to their feet when the ball was hit deep. Shoot, I’d play for nothing!”

Various non-baseball films also reference the scandal. In The Godfather: Part II (1974), gangster Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) declares: “I loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, filmed four times (in 1926, 1949, 1974, and 2013) and as a 2000 made-for-TV movie, includes the character Meyer Wolfsheim, said to have fixed the series and clearly based on Rothstein. In the 1926 film, the character is named “Charles Wolf.” In the 1949 version, he is “Myron Lupus.”

The disparate depictions of real-life ballplayers in Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams serve to emphasize that films featuring real-life individuals offer the subjective views of their creators. They also usually present skewed representations of history. Sometimes, inaccuracies result from sloppy scholarship; more often, they exist to keep the storyline lean and comprehensible.2 Both are the case in The Stratton Story, a biopic about White Sox hurler Monty Stratton.

The real Stratton, a Texas farm boy, was in 1937–38 a promising major league pitcher. But in November 1938, while target-shooting on his mother’s farm, he shot at a rabbit and his revolver accidently discharged while returning it to its holster. The bullet severed the femoral artery in his right leg, gangrene soon set in, and the leg was amputated above the knee.3

Though Stratton played for the Pale Hose in the 1930s—specific years and dates are not cited in the screenplay—The Stratton Story, made in 1949, is more a reflection of post-World War II America. Douglas Morrow, who earned an Academy Award for the film’s story and scripted it with Guy Trosper, had attended a game at the Sawtelle Soldiers Home, a Southern California facility for disabled GIs. “Seeing the armless and legless spectators, Morrow had the desire to find a film story that would give them hope,” wrote film industry reporter-biographer Bob Thomas. “He thought the story should be divorced from the war. Then he remembered Monte [sic] Stratton.”4

Stratton is played in the film by James Stewart. The ex-big leaguer was the film’s technical advisor and coached Stewart on the art of pitching. He noted that the actor “did a great job playing me, in a picture which I figure was about as true to life as they could make it.”5 Despite this hype, however, The Stratton Story is loaded with misinformation. In an effort to ensure narrative clarity, none of Stratton’s siblings are present onscreen and only two of the five seasons he spent in Chicago are represented. The hurler played in the minors in Omaha and Galveston (in 1934) and St. Paul (1935), yet only Omaha is cited in the script.

Other changes are historical revisions designed to make the scenario more acceptable to viewers. In the film, Stratton shoots himself with a hunting rifle rather than a revolver. The film ends with his return to the sport in a Houston exhibition pitting the “Southern All-Stars” and “Western All-Stars,” but he really did so in a White Sox-Cubs charity game, held in Comiskey Park, organized to raise money for him.

Other “facts” also reflect the 1940s rather than 1930s. One example: Stratton’s comeback game took place in 1939. In the film, his mound opponent is Gene Bearden, who did not pitch in the majors until 1947. The last batter he faces is Johnny Lindell, whose first big league appearance was a one-game looksee in 1941. Still others are even less explicable. When Stratton is recalled from the minors, a Clark Gable-Lana Turner film, Honky Tonk, is screening in a movie theatre. The film was released in 1941, three years after Stratton threw his last major league pitch.

Perhaps the most egregious error involves Stratton’s major league debut on June 2, 1934. This was his lone big league appearance that season, coming against the Detroit Tigers, and Stratton surrendered four hits and two runs in 3 1/3 innings. Stratton entered the game with two outs in the sixth inning, relieving Phil Gallivan. Hank Greenberg had just walked and promptly stole second on Stratton. Jo-Jo White then lined out to left field.6

In The Stratton Story, the hurler comes in to pitch in relief against the New York Yankees. “Dickey, DiMaggio, Gehrig. You can’t power past them, kid,” Barney Wile (Frank Morgan), Stratton’s fictional onscreen mentor, advises the hurler. “If you’re gonna get by,” Wile adds, “you gotta out-think ‘em, cross ‘em up, give ‘em what they don’t expect.” (According to the Chicago Tribune, the real-life Wile was “Jockie Tate, a former Texas leaguer, who always had a blank contract handy in case something good suddenly turned up.”)7

Wile’s advice may be sound, but what follows is pure fiction. The first batter Stratton faces is Bill Dickey (appearing as himself). The Bombers’ backstop homers on Stratton’s first pitch. (Stratton allowed no round-trippers in his actual debut.) Also included in the sequence is stock footage of Joe DiMaggio belting a dinger and circling the bases. There is a catch, however: The Yankee Clipper did not debut in the majors until 1936.

So Monty Stratton’s real debut was not nearly as disastrous as depicted in The Stratton Story. The question is: Why rewrite history? Simply put, having Stratton face Hall of Famer Dickey and the New York nine is more dramatically potent than having him pitch to Jo-Jo White.

The Yankees’ success also allowed for some repartee that surely would have delighted George Steinbrenner. Stratton tells his wife, “Honey, do you know there’s a tailor in Chicago that gives a suit of clothes away to any ballplayer that hits the scoreboard in center field? As of yesterday the New York Yankees are the best-dressed team in baseball.”

In June 1948, during the film’s pre-production, Roy Rowland—assigned to direct The Stratton Story—shot footage of the White Sox at Comiskey Park. By the time filming began, Sam Wood had replaced Rowland. Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter announced that Gregory Peck would be playing Stratton while Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio producing the film, hyped Van Johnson for the part. But in the end, Stewart got the role.

The studio also reported that 72 pro ballplayers appeared onscreen. Many were at one point or another affiliated with Chicago teams; the list begins with Merv Shea, Hank Sauer, Peanuts Lowrey, Catfish Metkovich, Gene Mauch, Tuck Stainback, Lou Novikoff, Bobby Sturgeon, Steve Mesner, Lou Stringer, Red Kress, Al Zarilla, and Gus Zernial. Most significantly, Jimmy Dykes, who became the Sox player-manager fifteen games into the 1934 season and helmed the team into the 1946 campaign, appears as himself. Of Stratton’s teammates, Ted Lyons has the most screen time, but the real Lyons is not in the film. Instead, he is played by actor Bruce Cowling.8 Legend has it that Ronald Reagan, who three years later played Pete Alexander in The Winning Team, desperately wanted the Stratton role. But he was under contract with Warner Bros., which refused to lend him to MGM.9

Across the years, other real-life Chicago ballplayers have appeared onscreen. The Giants-White Sox Tour (1914) is the first notable feature-length documentary to spotlight big leaguers. Variety, the motion picture trade publication, described it as a “long reeled picture of the baseball players’ trip around the world the past winter… with here and there snatches of a baseball game played between the natives and the teams in foreign countries. The well-known ballplayers who went along are shown individually at different times, with Germany Schaefer always in the foreground whenever the camera was working…”10 (Schaefer had played for the Chicago Orphans [aka the Cubs] in 1901 and 1902.)

Some onscreen Chicago ballplayers are more obscure: Frank Shellenback, Ray French, and Smead Jolley had small roles in Alibi Ike; Shellenback also appeared in Joe E. Brown’s Fireman, Save My Child (1932). Others are Hall of Famers; Ernie Banks has appeared in over a dozen feature films, television movies, and television series. (He was billed as “Steamer Fan” in Pastime [1990], a baseball film, and played a cabbie in a 1985 Hill Street Blues episode.) A highlight reel of other Cooperstown inductees with Chicago connections begins with Rube Waddell, who pitched for the Chicago Orphans in 1901 and appeared as himself in the documentary shorts Rube Waddell and the Champions Playing Ball with the Boston Team (1902) and Game of Base Ball (1903); Leo Durocher, who managed the Cubs from 1966–72 and was seen in Whistling in Brooklyn (1943), The Errand Boy (1961), and such TV series as Mister Ed, The Munsters, and The Beverly Hillbillies; and Frank Thomas, who played The Rookie in Mr. Baseball (1992).11

Some films have actually featured the ballparks themselves. In this regard, Wrigley Field far outweighs Old Comiskey Park and its successor as onscreen locations or references. (Wrigley Field Chicago should not be confused with Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, built in 1925. Besides serving as a Pacific Coast League park, it was a playground for exhibition games featuring Tinseltown celebs. Countless films and TV shows were shot there, from the Babe Ruth feature Babe Comes Home [1927] through “The Mighty Casey,” a 1960 Twilight Zone episode, the Home Run Derby TV show, and “Herman the Rookie,” a 1965 installment of The Munsters.)12

An infinitesimal number of films feature on-location images of Old Comiskey. But one—a non-baseball film—is extra-special. Only the Lonely (1991) includes a sequence shot not long after the 1990 season, just prior to the park’s demolition. The hero is a Chicago cop (John Candy) who shares his first date with the woman he is courting by taking her to Old Comiskey, where they share an on-field picnic.

The then-new ball yard briefly appears, but the focus is on the soon-to-disappear park, which is paid homage via the line, “Boy, it’s a shame they’re gonna tear this all down.” The sequence reportedly was filmed on a Friday, with the demolition beginning the following week. Jacolyn J. Baker, an Only the Lonely location manager, described it as “a special night,” adding: “Everybody knew that this was going to be the last time anybody would be in Comiskey Park… In between takes, people were playing catch on the field. You felt that this was about to be taken away. It was really special.”13

Wrigley Field’s iconic status has more than occasionally been celebrated onscreen. The Chicago location of While You Were Sleeping (1995), a Sandra Bullock-Bill Pullman romantic comedy-drama, is established via a series of city landmarks. One, of course, is The Friendly Confines, as much a symbol of its town as Yankee Stadium is to New York. In Sleepless in Seattle (1993), baseball is a byword for romance, a loving family, and bliss. As the film opens, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks), a Chicago architect, has just lost his wife to cancer. As Sam mourns the loss of his beloved, there is a split-second flashback to a memory of a happier time as he, his late wife, and their young son pose outside Wrigley Field.

The first onscreen image in The Break-Up (2006) is a long shot of Wrigley during a game. The second is the red-and-white Wrigley sign. Die-hard Cubs fan Gary Grobowski (Vince Vaughn) is in the stands, and he rests his face in his hands in agony as a fly ball drops between three Cubs fielders. His pal Johnny O (Jon Favreau), who is garbed in White Sox regalia, laughs hysterically.

One of the more celebrated Wrigley references occurs in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), in which the title character (Matthew Broderick), a high school senior, cons most of the world into thinking he is deathly ill so that he can skip school. Ferris is joined by his girlfriend and best pal and the trio spends a day enjoying Chicago’s amenities. How could the afternoon pass without a Wrigley visit?

Ferris’ main nemesis is Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), the pompous school dean determined to bust him. Rooney happens to be inside a pizza parlor and beside a TV set on which the Cubs contest is being broadcast. The home nine are in the field, the inimitable voice of Harry Caray notes that Lee Smith is on the mound, and the unnamed batter hits a long foul ball into the leftfield stands. Who do you suppose nabs it? None other than Ferris Bueller! But Rooney is oblivious. He asks the score and is told “nothing-nothing.” His doltishness is ever-apparent by his next question: “Who’s winning?” The not-amused pizza man tells him, “The Bears.”

Not all screen characters seeing a live Cubs game actually do so inside the park. About Last Night… (1986), a romantic drama based on David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, is framed by softball games in Grant Park during successive summers in which Danny (Rob Lowe), the hero, and Debbie (Demi Moore), the heroine, meet and then become reacquainted after breaking up. In between, they watch a Cubs game not from Wrigley but from a nearby rooftop, where they can be alone. About Last Night… also features a peek into what some women might discuss at ballgames. Debbie and her pal Joan (Elizabeth Perkins) are chatting, and Debbie observes: “That second baseman’s got a really nice ass.” To which Joan responds: “I refuse to go out with a man whose ass is smaller than mine.”

In Hardball (2001), aimless Conor O’Neill (Keanu Reeves) finds direction in coaching pre-teen Little Leaguers from the Cabrini-Green housing project. At one point, Conor escorts the kids to a Cubs game. The boys are close enough to the field to attract the attention of what then was a premier Cubbie. “Yo, check it out,” one of the boys yells to his pals. “That’s Sammy Sosa over there … right there.” Alas, another boy points out that it is not Sammy, and the Sosa spotter is dissed by his pals. But then he spots the real Sosa, garbed in a warm-up jacket and wielding a bat. Quickly, the kids grab Sammy’s attention. He smiles, kisses his fingers, moves them to his heart, and shoots them a “V” for victory. The music swells on the soundtrack, and the boys are in baseball heaven.

Not only is The Blues Brothers (1980) among the higher-profile Chicago-set films of recent decades, it also features a baseball reference that is the equivalent of a grand-slam homer. At one point, the brothers Jake (John Belushi) and Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) elude the police but are not trouble-free; Jake points out to Elwood, “Those cops have your name, your address …” But not to worry. As Elwood explains: “They don’t got my address. I falsified my renewal. I put down 1060 West Addison.”

Surely, those cops are not real Chicagoans; if they were, they would not need Elwood Blues to tell them: “1060 West Addison. That’s Wrigley Field.”

ROB EDELMAN teaches film history at the University at Albany. He authored “Great Baseball Films” and “Baseball on the Web,” and, with his wife Audrey Kupferberg, “Meet the Mertzes,” a double biography of “I Love Lucy’s” Vivian Vance and famed baseball fan William Frawley. A frequent contributor to “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game,” he has written articles on baseball and pop culture for many publications.

Notes

1. J. Weintraub, “Why They Call It the Second City,” Chicago Reader, July 29, 1993.

2. Rob Edelman, “The Winning Team: Fact and Fiction in Celluloid Biographies,” The National Pastime, Number 26, 2006.

3. “Stratton’s Leg Amputated Above Knee,” Chicago Tribune, November 29, 1938.

4. Bob Thomas, “Hollywood Highlights.” Spokane Daily Chronicle, February 24, 1948.

5. “Monty Stratton, 70, Pitcher Who Inspired Movie, Is Dead,” The New York Times, September 30, 1982.

6. www.retrosheet.org.

7. Irving Vaughan, “Plowboy to Mound Ace Is Story of Stratton’s Career,” Chicago Tribune, November 29, 1938.

8. Patricia King Hanson, Executive Editor, American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States, Feature Films, 1941–1950, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999.

9. “Monty Stratton, 70, Pitcher Who Inspired Movie, Is Dead,” The New York Times, September 30, 1982.

10. Rob Edelman, “The Baseball Film to 1920,” Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, Volume 1, Number 1, 2007.

11. www.imdb.com.

12. www.wikipedia.org.

13. Michael Corcoran, Arnie Bernstein, Hollywood on Lake Michigan, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013.

Who’s the batter? Nowadays, fans attending a Detroit Tigers game at Comerica Park can just look at the player—his name and assigned number are on the back of his uniform, and his name is displayed prominently on a huge scoreboard. However, a hundred years or so ago, Tigers fans attending a baseball game at Navin Field in Detroit had to buy a scorecard to find out who was batting. Fans could see the ID number of the batter on the scoreboard on the outfield wall. (Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Navin Field scoreboard as it appeared during the 1934 World Series

 

The scoreboard had been located in left-center, but was relocated to right field to accommodate a bleacher section that was built for the World Series. In the upper left corner of the scoreboard, indicated by the arrow, it reads BATTER. The number 11 is shown, which corresponded to Schoolboy Rowe, who pitched and batted ninth in the order for Detroit that day. The line score indicates that the Cardinals completed their at bats in the top of the 5th inning, their line score being 1-0-0-0-2. The line score for Detroit (through the bottom of the 4th inning) is 0-0-1-0. According to the scoreboard, the Tigers are batting in the bottom of the 5th; there are two outs. This is in perfect synch with box score and play-by-play information given on Retrosheet for Game 6 of the 1934 World Series, confirming that Rowe is the batter.

The fans would then check their scorecards which listed the player names and their scoreboard ID numbers. Scorecards not only brought in revenue from sales at the ballpark, they were also a source of advertising revenue from local businesses. Figure 2 shows the scorecard grid for a game between Detroit and St. Louis in June 1922: four ads surround the grid. Other ads in the scorecard included Adams Black Jack Gum, Hotel Fort Shelby, Michigan Parfay Co., the American State Bank, the Haskins Agency (underwriting), Max O’Leary (Ford dealership), Louis Schiappacasse & Co. (fruits, candy, nuts, produce), and Thompson Auto Co. (Federal Motor Trucks dealership).1

Figure 2. The Detroit scorecard grid section for a Tigers-Browns game in June 1922

Unlike today, when players are assigned uniform numbers that very rarely change within a season, and some players might wear the same number for their entire careers, the ID numbers of players at Navin Field could vary from game to game. Because of changes in the roster, due to in-season transactions such as trades or promotions/demotions from/to the minor leagues, as well as changes in the starting lineups due to managerial realignments of the batting order, ID numbers would be reassigned. A new scorecard had to be bought for each game, or at least for each series, since the scorecards could not be reused from one series to the next, nor could the numbers be memorized. For example, Figure 3 compares facsimile scorecards for two games between the Tigers and the Yankees in 1926 at Navin Field, June 10 and September 11, following the same format as the scorecard shown in Figure 2.

Figure 3. Facsimile Detroit scorecard lineups from June 10, and September 11, 1926

Only two players had the same ID number for both games—Jackie Tavener (7) and Hooks Dauss (11). Even player-manager Ty Cobb had different ID numbers (4 and 61) for these games, reflecting that he was in the starting lineup in one game and not in the other. The scoreboard ID numbers corresponded to the lineup positions for the first seven batters, while the eighth spot is occupied by two catchers with scoreboard ID numbers 8 and 9. The pitchers have numbers in the teens and low twenties. The other players have scoreboard numbers that seem somewhat unusual—ID number 49 is that of the third-string catcher, while the others seem assigned at random: 51, 61, 71, 112, 151, and 171. (We do not know why many of these additional numbers end with the numeral one, though perhaps limiting the unique numerals used aided in the operation of the manual scoreboard.) With 27 unique home series between the Tigers and other American League clubs, there could have been as many as 27 unique scorecards, though examination of existing examples suggests they did not always update for every series. Examination of Retrosheet box scores suggests the numbers 1-6 and 8 were assigned to many different players during the course of the season. See Figure 4.

Figure 4. Possible Scoreboard ID Number Assignments for Players on the 1926 Detroit Tigers

These constant changes were certainly not fan-friendly. A simpler system would be to assign one number per player—such as a uniform number—which could be used as scoreboard ID number all season. While the idea had often been proposed, the majority of major-league clubs—including the Detroit Baseball Club—were strongly opposed because they feared it would reduce the sales of scorecards. As stated by Jack Looney in his book Now Batting, Number…, “during the idle winter months prior to the 1931 season, American League president Ernest S. Barnard informed all clubs in the league that players must wear numbers. He suggested that regulars wear #1–7, the catchers #8-11, pitchers #12–24 and utility players the rest. The #13 was left to the discretion of each team.”2 As The Sporting News reported, “The American League decided to number all of its players in 1931. It appeared to be the opinion of the owners that such identification had helped to maintain the individuality of Babe Ruth. With a number on his back, no one had mistaken him for any other player.”3 Uniform numbers had previously been used briefly, by Cleveland in 1916 and by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1923.4 The Cleveland Indians and the New York Yankees began using numbers on the backs of the uniforms of their players in 1929, and maintained the practice from then on.5 All eight National League clubs did so starting in 1932.6

The need for teams to assign one permanent ID number to each player is clearly demonstrated by Detroit Tigers scorecards from the 1930 season, the year before Barnard’s edict. Three are compared in Figure 5. See also Figure 6.

Figure 5. Comparison of the ID numbers shown in printed scorecards May 4, July 4, and September 27, 1930

In 1930, Detroit hosted 25 home series with at least 25 unique scorecards. A total of 36 players participated in at least one game. As was the custom, the ID numbers reflected the batting order, giving the leadoff hitter number 1, the next batter 2, etc. The catcher always occupied the eighth spot in the batting lineup, and both the first-string catcher and his primary backup were shown on the pre-printed scorecard, assigned numbers 8 and 9, respectively. A blank space beneath the catcher’s line was provided for the fan to fill in the name of the starting pitcher. Figure 6 presents a listing of the ID code numbers for the players on the 1930 Tigers, based on seven surviving scorecards viewed by the author.

Figure 6. Scoreboard ID Numbers for Players on the 1930 Detroit Tigers, Derived from Seven Unique Scorecards

Here are a few of the interesting aspects of the scoreboard numbers for the 1930 Tigers:

• During the season, manager Bucky Harris (who also had a code number in case he was activated) used numerous lineups and several player transactions took place. John Stone had at least five different code numbers—1, 112, 5, 6, 171. Likewise Bill Akers—61, 71, 7, 6, 223. Liz Funk, Roy Johnson, Mark Koenig, and Billy Rogell each had at least four different scoreboard numbers; Marty McManus and Charlie Sullivan each had at least three.
• The scoreboard number assigned to the most different players appears to be 7. The following seven players had scoreboard number 7 and batted seventh in the seven scorecards examined—Yats Wuestling, Billy Rogell, Roy Johnson, Bill Akers, Mark Koenig, Tom Hughes, and Johnny Watson. According to box scores for other games played at Navin Field, Frank Doljack, Bob Fothergill, and Liz Funk also batted seventh, so as many as ten players may have had ID number 7.
• The out-of-sorts scoreboard numbers on the seven scorecards examined include 31 (Charlie Sullivan), 49 (third-string catchers Tony Rensa, Gene Desautels, and Hughie Wise); 61 (Bill Akers, Paul Easterling, Mark Koenig, and Marty McManus); 71 (Akers, Bob Fothergill, and Koenig); 112 (Bucky Harris, Jimmy Shevlin, and John Stone); 122 (Roy Johnson and Shevlin); 149 (Harris), 151 (Easterling and Rogell); 161 (Hank Greenberg); 171 (Stone); and 223 (Akers). Examination of other scorecards would probably yield more players with these numbers and that there may be additional out-of-the-ordinary scoreboard numbers.

Given Barnard’s edict, one might expect that for the 1931 season, this situation would cease. And the Detroit Baseball Club did comply with the AL mandate to give uniform numbers to each of its players in 1931, but the club only followed the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. While the players were assigned uniform numbers, the Tigers did not display those numbers on the scoreboard. They continued to use variable scoreboard ID numbers in 1931–34, ensuring that fans still needed to purchase scorecards. For example, in 1933, when Hank Greenberg joined the Tigers for good, his uniform number for the entire season was 7, but his scoreboard number varied among four different numbers—61, 5, 6, and 7.

Figure 7 shows the scorecard grid from the Tigers official scorecard for the August 2–4, 1933, series versus the Chicago White Sox. The scoreboard number (Scr. Br. No.) is given on the left of the player’s name and the uniform number (Uniform No.) is shown on the right. The player’s uniform number presented in parentheses suggests that it was not as important as the scoreboard number (at least according to the Detroit Baseball Club). For the players in the starting lineup, only Greenberg’s scoreboard number (7) and his uniform number (7) are the same. Among the pitchers and players not in the starting lineup, none have the same scoreboard and uniform number.

Figure 7. The Detroit scorecard grid section for Tigers-White Sox series, August 2–4, 1933

Examining the practices of the Tigers in the 1931–34 period reveals how the practice of uniform number adoption was changing. There are many interesting aspects to discover about the ID numbers and the uniform numbers of the Tigers players for each season during the 1931–34 period. Many of these are presented in the Appendix to this paper, which is found online at SABR.org. Some items of particular note are given here:

• In 1931, three players had unusually high (out-of-sorts) uniform numbers—Johnny Grabowski (35), George Quellich (37), and Art Herring (41), as did two Detroit coaches—Jean Dubuc (43) and (future Hall-of-Famer) Roger Bresnahan (52). We don’t know whether these numbers had any special significance to those men or if the assignments were random. Only Herring continued in the major leagues beyond the 1931 season, but he changed to the uniform number 18 in both 1932 and 1933.
• In 1931, the Tigers reassigned six different uniform numbers within the season. Uniform number 5 was worn by both Marty McManus (107 games, April 14 through August 25) and Gene Desautels (3 games, September 23–27); uniform number 6: Frank Doljack (60 games, April 14 through July 25) and Orlin Collier (2 games, September 11–23); uniform number 8: Wally Schang (30 games, April 14 through June 22) and Muddy Ruel (14 games, September 14–26); uniform number 29: Marv Owen (107 games, April 16 through August 16) and Nolen Richardson (38 games, August 20 through September 27). Three players each wore uniform number 7 at one time or another during the season—Bill Akers (29 games, April 14 through June 8), Louis Brower (21 games, June 13 through July 27), and Billy Rogell (48 games, August 8 through September 27).
• Twenty men were on the Tigers in both 1931 and 1932, but only two of them had the same uniform number in both seasons—Tommy Bridges (16) and Dale Alexander (4). But only one 1932 player had a different uniform number in 1933—Frank Doljack (21 changing to 9). Eighteen men played for Detroit in both 1933 and 1934; only three of them had the same uniform number in both seasons—Chief Hogsett (17), Ray Hayworth (23), and Charlie Gehringer (2).
• Considering the uniform numbers ultimately retired by the Tigers—1 (in honor of Lou Whitaker, 2022), 2 (Charlie Gehringer, 1983), 3 (Alan Trammell, 2018), 5 (Hank Greenberg, 1983), 6 (Al Kaline, 1980), 11 (Sparky Anderson, 2011), 16 (Hal Newhouser, 1997), 23 (Willie Horton, 2000), 47 (Jack Morris, 2018)—the following 1931 Tigers were the first ones to wear them—Hub Walker (1), Gee Walker (2), Charlie Gehringer (3), Marty McManus (5), Frank Doljack (6), Earl Whitehill (11), Tommy Bridges (16). Note that the number 42 has been retired in all of MLB in Jackie Robinson’s honor.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In 1935, the Tigers finally did away with the practice of forcing fans to refer to variable scoreboard ID numbers for each game: the official scorecards provided only the players’ uniform numbers, which were used on the scoreboard. Even though the 1931–34 Tigers players had fixed uniform numbers to meet the mandate of the American League, the Detroit Baseball Club chose to use the same varying ID number system for display on the outfield scoreboard used in 1930 (as well as prior seasons). Examination of the uniform numbers for the Detroit Tigers during the 1931–34 seasons yields a fascinating story—revealing the strategy of the Detroit Baseball Club to circumvent the “spirit of the law” by keeping in place the scoreboard numbers while following the “letter of the law” by introducing uniform numbers, which were functionally irrelevant.

This is just one of the numerous engaging aspects that have emerged from my quest (which commenced in January 2001) to independently ascertain complete and accurate uniform numbers for the diamondeers who played for (and/or managed or coached) the Tigers (or who were on the active roster, but did not play—aka “Phantom Tigers”) from 1931 forward.7 (As described in previous articles, I have detailed other extraordinary aspects provided by the uniform numbers worn by Detroit Tiger players over the ensuing years.8) Other teams also participated in this practice of assigning scoreboard numbers, yet very little about them is mentioned in the many books about uniform numbers.9 Researching the topic is hereby heartily recommended to diehard fans of their teams, with the caveat that while the endeavor will be both challenging and rewarding, it will also likely be (very) frustrating, as exemplified by my not yet having been able to ascertain the uniform numbers (and scoreboard numbers) of Luke Hamlin and Roxy Lawson on the 1933 Detroit Tigers.10 

HERM KRABBENHOFT, a longtime SABR member—and frequent contributor to both the Baseball Research Journal and The National Pastime—has been a Detroit Tigers fan since Zeb Eaton (uniform #17) hit a pinch grand slam against the Yankees (July 15, 1945). Herm’s first in-person Tigers grand slam was by Bill Tuttle (#5) on May 20, 1956, at Briggs Stadium versus the Senators. Other memorable Tigers home runs for Herm include four by Charlie Maxwell (#4) on Sunday, May 3, 1959, vs the Yankees.

Detroit manager Bucky Harris (shown with Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1932), was assigned various ID numbers in case he was activated as a player. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

Online appendix

Click here to view the online appendix to this article

Mary Dobkin at age 77, while speaking to the press about the TV movie “Aunt Mary.” (Historic Images)

Nineteen-seventy-nine was quite a year for Baltimore. The Orioles returned to the World Series for the first time in eight years and one of the city’s most impactful residents got well-deserved national recognition. Her name was Mary Dobkin. Aunt Mary. Nearing 80 years of age with spryness belying her declining physical condition—which included prosthetics because of the amputation of both feet and half of a leg—Dobkin stood in the box of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn at Memorial Stadium under a nighttime sky in mid-October. Baseball’s decision makers had bestowed upon her the honor of throwing out the ceremonial first pitch for Game Six of the World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates.1

Doug DeCinces, the home team’s third baseman, was her battery mate. Though not a nationally known VIP, Dobkin was baseball royalty in Chesapeake Bay’s environs; she created teams for kids who wanted to play baseball but otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity.

Dobkin’s story is heartbreaking, which makes her resilience even more inspiring. When she and her parents came from Russia to America, her mother left the family and her father died. An aunt and uncle, already with five kids, took Mary in and they moved to Baltimore. The family either never went looking for her or gave up too soon when 6-year-old Mary wandered the streets during a cold night, suffering frostbite and a loss of consciousness.

A Good Samaritan took Mary to the hospital. Speaking only Russian, and with severe physical challenges, which eventually led to her amputations, Mary was never reclaimed by her aunt and uncle. She became a ward of the city and lived at the Johns Hopkins Hospital until she was in her late 30s. But her spirit would not be quashed by her lifelong problems, which the frostbite had triggered. “By all known rules, I should have died,” she said. “If God was good enough to let me live, I made up my mind that I would work with children for the rest of my life.”2

Mary learned English through radio broadcasts and newspapers, which is a familiar tale for twentieth-century immigrants. Baseball was both an outlet and a salve. “Then one summer she got to attend therapy camp,” reads a 1979 Los Angeles Times profile. “From her wheelchair, she was taught to catch and hit a baseball. It was magic. Quiet, reclusive Mary Dobkin returned to the hospital a new person, ignited by direct experience with baseball.”3

She combined her dedication to kids and love of baseball in the early 1940s.4

Baltimore’s leading newspaper, the Sun, reported on Dobkin being more than an organizer when one of her teams got selected to play at Memorial Stadium in 1954. It was part of an Interfaith Night sponsored by B’nai B’rith, Knights of Columbus, and the Boumi Temple Shrine. She was a coach. “Miss Mary goes out to the ball field and directs some of the teams some nights, either from her wheelchair or on her crutches or from the aluminum beach chair her boys bought her,” the Sun reported.5

Dobkin learned the fundamentals of baseball from TV broadcasts of Orioles games and often hosted kids at her apartment to join her in this endeavor. Neither her sex nor her infirmity, marked by 110 operations, were an issue in gaining their confidence. “The boys themselves wanted me to manage their team and never once have they made reference to the fact that I’m a woman doing what normally is a man’s job,” she said.6

Her efforts impressed local merchants and the business community, who launched the Dobkin Children’s Fund. Donations included “many thousands of dollars’ worth of sports equipment and facilities.” The number of boys in Dobkin’s operation was estimated to be “about 200” in 1958.7

That year, Dobkin was honored by the TV show End of the Rainbow, described on IMDb as a show that ran in 1957–58, with co-hosts Bob Barker and Art Baker going across America and surprising “the less-fortunate who helped others when they could barely help themselves.” Dobkin’s bounty included uniforms and equipment for her teams in baseball, basketball, and football along with a television and $1,000 for the Mary Dobkin Children’s Fund.

The program had an emotional wallop for the woman who represented toughness, perseverance, and encouragement for Baltimore’s kids. She shared a promise that she’d made during her own childhood: “If God is good enough to let me live to be a grown-up, I’ll devote my whole life to helping children.”8

But Dobkin’s appearance did not happen solely because of the production staff. The board members of the children’s fund had written letters advocating for Dobkin to be a guest on This Is Your Life, a 30-minute show that usually focused on the lives of celebrities. Ralph Edwards produced both shows. The board never heard back about This Is Your Life but did hear from End of the Rainbow.9

No less an authority than the Baltimore Police Department certified Dobkin’s impact on the community. Captain Millard B. Horton said, “We all recognize that there is a juvenile problem in these underprivileged areas, but Miss Dobkin is one of the few people who really went out and did something about solving it.”10

Don Gamber was one of the kids who played for Dobkin. “Mary was friends with the crossing guard, Miss Helen, and she used to ask her to take us to the Fifth Regiment Armory to see the Ringling Brothers Circus every year,” recalls Gamber, a pitcher and outfielder on Dobkin’s teams. “One time, she called my mom and said, ‘Pat, can I take your boys for a surprise?’ She brought me, my brother John, my cousin Danny, and some other neighborhood kids to Memorial Stadium to throw a surprise birthday party for Bubba Smith after a Colts practice.

“Mary was selfless and she loved the kids. She didn’t take any crap. Other managers didn’t like her. She argued with umps. There were certain kids that she got close with. I was one. She knew that I had a lot of talent with baseball and football and introduced me to Bob Davidson, owner of a Ford dealership on York Road. He got me involved in Ford Punt Pass and Kick competitions. Mary got me tryouts with the Orioles, Pirates, and Reds.”11

At the beginning of 1960, a front-page story appeared in the Evening Sun describing the questionable future of the fund. Even with donations, Dobkin didn’t have the means to pay rent for the clubhouse at 1323 Harford Avenue.12

Moved by Dobkin’s efforts, some people paid for newspaper ads asking for contributions. In March, Samuel Stofberg and Stanley Stofberg sponsored an announcement revealing that the donations had allowed the fund to pay for part of the clubhouse but more would be needed to pay each month; the fund didn’t own it outright.13

Through donations inspired in part by personal newspaper advertisements, Dobkin got enough to start another clubhouse in the Armistead Gardens neighborhood. It was sorely needed. Dobkin’s efforts gave kids an outlet that protected them from submitting to self-destructive activities. When an adult saw some kids wearing her team’s uniforms and asked her whether they had a game, Dobkin said, “Those kids are wearing my uniforms because they don’t have anything else to wear to school.”14

The consistent goodwill toward Dobkin and the kids she supervised did not go unnoticed. In January 1964, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Evening Sun highlighting the generosity of the holiday season reflected in parties held by the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute’s junior class and faculty members; Toys for Tots donations from the US Marine Corps First Engineer Battalion; and the American Sokol-Club and St. Francis Xavier Church giving space for parties. “We hope members of our community will continue to help us with our year-round program for underprivileged children as long as the need exists,” she wrote.15

In March, the Evening Sun ran a feature story that allowed her to dispel a misperception about the donations, which included a block of 500 tickets to a Baltimore Bullets basketball game. “Whenever I get publicity, it seems that people get the notion that we’re rich and have all we need,” said Dobkin. “That just isn’t the case. In September we were broke.”16

Dobkin also ran a softball team for girls called Dobkin’s Dolls.17

In 1966, a banquet honoring her 25 years of generosity drew luminaries including Rocky Marciano, Johnny Unitas, Brooks Robinson, Dave McNally, Jim Palmer, Steve Barber, and announcer Chuck Thompson, who served as the toastmaster. Robinson said what the people in Chesapeake Bay’s environs had known since the early 1940s: “Mary Dobkin can’t be repaid in full for the wonderful work she has done in Baltimore.” Unitas noted her impact as well: “The work Mary has done has cut down juvenile delinquency and I hope there will be many more Mary Dobkins.”18

In 1973, Dobkin was part of a group of two dozen Baltimore citizens honored during the City Fair for being “Special Baltimoreans.” They were selected by a committee from “among several hundred nominations…for outstanding contributions to the quality of city life.”19

Dobkin’s life became the basis for Aunt Mary, a 1979 Hallmark Hall of Fame movie starring Jean Stapleton. It aired on CBS on December 5, about seven weeks after Dobkin’s moment in the World Series spotlight. Harold Gould and Martin Balsam had supporting roles. According to the Baltimore News-American, watching Aunt Mary was part of a homework assignment for “thousands of Baltimore school children,” along with reading a copy of the script.20

Jay Mazzone, a former Dobkin player who was a batboy during the Orioles’ 1966–71 heyday, perhaps best represented Aunt Mary’s determination because of a similar situation—doctors amputated his hands after his snowsuit caught fire when he was 2 years old. In Aunt Mary, Tim Gemelli plays an amputee whom Dobkin recruits; Gemelli didn’t have a right hand at birth.21

At the time that the TV movie was in production, Dobkin had endured 155 operations.22

She recalled that her involvement with underprivileged kids began when she realized they didn’t have equipment that other kids had. East Baltimore wasn’t Pikesville or Reisterstown, after all. So she organized a raffle for a radio. Once the kids had an outlet for their restlessness, the streets were quieter. The merchants calmer. Amos Jones owned a food joint called the Dog House and praised Dobkin because there were no more break-ins, so he decided to buy uniforms for Dobkin’s Dynamites.23

Jones’s tale was one of several represented in the movie. Dobkin provided color commentary during the broadcast for Sun writer Michael Wentzel, who watched it in her East Baltimore apartment along with some of her friends. The events portrayed were steeped in fact. “That is for real,” Dobkin would say. “She would say it often during the film,” Wentzel wrote. A rock crashing through the glass in Dobkin’s living-room window. Dobkin blowing a whistle into the phone when she gets obscene phone calls. The tough kid named Nicholas.24

Many of the players kept in touch with their guidepost through adulthood, including Nicholas. “The real one stopped in earlier to say hello,” Dobkin said on the night of the broadcast. “He’s an engineer now.”25

Aunt Mary condenses the real story into a 1954–55 setting and emphasizes the pioneering aspect of her coaching. A key scene involves Dobkin subtly threatening a racist sporting goods store owner to provide a uniform for a Black player on her team, lest Tommy the Torch, a neighborhood arsonist, use his skills. Racial integration on Dobkin’s teams happened in 1955. Aunt Mary ends with her bringing a girl on the team; she actually busted the gender line in 1960.26

New York Times TV critic John J. O’Connor praised Stapleton’s portrayal as “an effective blend of compassion and toughness.”27 O’Connor’s counterpart at the Boston Globe, Robert A. McLean, was equally positive: “The best part is that Aunt Mary is for real, and it’s her life story that Stapleton portrays with depth and dignity and a fine flair for humor in the face of adversity.”28

The Sun’s Michael Hill also endorsed this story of Baltimore’s grande dame of baseball. After praising Stapleton’s performance, he wrote: “Indeed, the strength of ‘Aunt Mary’ is its near-perfect casting. Martin Balsam is his usual fine self as the across-the-hall neighbor, Dolph Sweet is perfect as the impresario of A.J.’s Dog House, the team’s sponsor, and even the kids, normally stumbling blocks in films like this, are quite believable.”29

Sun TV critic Bill Carter concurred: “[Stapleton] is an actress of intelligence; she knows how to cut through the schmaltz to the basics,” he wrote.30

Stapleton recalled meeting Dobkin early in the shooting of the movie in Los Angeles, though the Baltimore icon didn’t stay around to see the entire production. “She had a great PR talent,” Stapleton said. “She was always looking for publicity for the team and herself. She was a great lady.”31

Notes

1 Kay Mills, “Aunt Mary story filmed in Calif.,” Baltimore Evening Sun, May 1, 1979, C1.

2 Michael Hill, “‘Aunt Mary,’” Baltimore Evening Sun, December 5, 1979, B1.

3 Michael Jaffe, telephone interview, December 28, 2022.

4 Cecil Smith, “They Still Love Lucy,” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1977, 79.

5 Peter Werner, telephone interview, March 7, 2022.

6 Robbie Rist, telephone interview, February 3, 2023.

7 Telephone interview with Robbie Rist, February 3, 2023.

8 Hill, “‘Aunt Mary.’”

After their on-field exploits of 1961, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were sought by film producer Tom Naud for a Hollywood feature. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

Occasionally, baseball films spotlight sequences or storylines that are Florida-centric. Not surprisingly, they primarily are linked to spring training—and some even have real-world connections. Slide, Kelly, Slide (1927), for example, features the New York Yankees working out in Delano—and highlights guest appearances by Mike Donlin, Bob Meusel, Irish Meusel, and Tony Lazzeri. Big Leaguer (1953), starring Edward G. Robinson as ballplayer-turned-talent evaluator John B. “Hans” Lobert, is set in a New York Giants tryout camp in Melbourne. In Fear Strikes Out (1957), Boston Red Sox rookie Jimmy Piersall (Anthony Perkins) heads for spring training in Sarasota.

Others are fictional. Kill the Umpire (1950) stars William Bendix as an ex-ballplayer, loudmouth, and die-hard fan who resides with his family in St. Petersburg, where he sneaks off to Grapefruit League contests between the New York and St. Louis nines. Strategic Air Command (1955) toplines James Stewart as a B-29 bomber pilot-turned St. Louis Cardinals all-star third sacker who trains in St. Petersburg; in the film’s first shot, a car pulls up outside Al Lang Field, the designated “Winter Home (of the) St. Louis Cardinals.” In Major League (1989), a menagerie of has-been and never-were ballplayers shows up for Cleveland Indians’ spring training (albeit in Arizona, rather than Florida). But there is a Sunshine State connection: The snooty ex-showgirl who has just taken over team ownership schemes to move the Tribe to Florida. The city of Miami has promised her a new stadium, a Boca Raton mansion, and a Palm Beach Polo and Country Club membership. So how can she refuse?

In Fever Pitch (2005), the following dialogue is spoken between Ben (Jimmy Fallon), a Boston Red Sox fanatic, and Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), his new girlfriend:

Ben: “… every year during Easter vacation … uh, me and my friends, we go down to Florida.”

Lindsey: “You and your buddies go down to Florida for spring break? At your age?”

Ben: “No, no, no, not spring break. Spring training with the Red Sox.”

Lindsey: “Oh, you get to train with the Red Sox? Are you allowed to do that?”

Ben: “Well, we don’t actually. … We watch the games.”

Lindsey: “Aren’t those just practice games?”

Ben: “Yeah, yeah, but there’s more to it than that. We scout the players. We … we say which players they should keep … which they should get rid of.”

Lindsey: “And the Red Sox ask your opinion?”

Ben: “Well, not yet …”

Ben heads south and, later on, Lindsey tells him: “I saw you on ESPN.” He responds: “Oh! We looked like morons, didn’t we?” And his excuse: “Well, it’s very hot, you know, it’s Florida.”

Of all baseball films with Sunshine State/spring training connections, however, the one that most typifies the Grapefruit League world is not one of the first-division sports yarns. Far from it. For indeed, the best that can be said about Safe at Home! is that it is an innocuous kiddie film—and despite its spotlight on the New York Yankees, one need not wrap oneself up in pinstripe pride to savor it. The film (which was released in 1962) is a must-see if only because it stars the M&M boys themselves, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. The previous season, of course, Maris had whacked 61 dingers to top Babe Ruth’s single-season record, while Mantle chimed in with 54 round-trippers. Unlike Slide, Kelly, Slide and countless other films which feature real-life ballplayers in cameo appearances, these genuine American heroes not only shag flies and smash fastballs but also are called upon to act.

Safe at Home! is the saga of Hutch Lawton (Bryan Russell), a motherless, baseball-mad ten-year-old Little Leaguer who has moved to Palms, Florida, with his father, Ken (Don Collier), a struggling charter boat operator. Henry, a fellow Little Leaguer and patronizing banker’s son, harasses Hutch because the elder Lawton is immersed in his work and unable to watch the team practice. Hutch responds by bragging that his dad not only is more baseball-savvy than any other parent but is best buddies with New York Yankees players—and specifically Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. The youngster even claims that Ken Lawton is “Roger Maris’s best friend in the whole South.”

Hutch of course is dumbfounded upon being pressured to bring the ballplayers to a league dinner. What will he do? “I’m gonna go see ’em,” he declares. “That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna ask ’em to help. They just gotta say yes.” So the youngster sneaks off to Fort Lauderdale, then the Yankees’ spring training home, by hiding in the back of a fish truck operated by a friend’s father. Upon his arrival, he sneaks into the Mick’s hotel room and Fort Lauderdale Stadium; showers in the same stall where the ballplayers clean up; falls asleep in the team’s locker room while garbed in Maris’s jersey and employing Mantle’s as a blanket; and is confronted by Bill Turner (William Frawley), a quick-tempered yet sympathetic Yankees coach. As any young fan might, Hutch imagines himself a flychaser who is cheered on as he smacks base hits and makes circus catches. Plus, he endlessly sighs, “Mickey Mantle…Roger Maris…Gosh…Gee….” In the tradition of happy-ever-after Hollywood finales, Hutch realizes that fibbing is bad business, Ken learns that his son requires attention and understanding, and Hutch and his teammates get to visit Fort Lauderdale and spend quality time with Mantle, Maris, and their teammates.

Robert Creamer, writing in Sports Illustrated, observed that Safe at Home! “was designed for cheap, quick filming, a [spring training 1962] release date and a fast buck.” The previous summer, as Mantle and Maris were smashing dingers, Tom Naud, the film’s eventual producer and story co-author, conjured up the idea of starring them onscreen. He contacted Frank Scott, the ballplayers’ agent, and a deal quickly was struck. In the original storyline, Mantle and Maris were to play deaf-and-dumb siblings—perhaps because they could not read lines believably—but the concept was nixed by Scott. What then emerged was the scenario that was used in the film and, by November 1961, all was in place for the spring shooting schedule.1 The New York Times added that Safe at Home! was produced by Columbia Pictures “on a comparatively modest budget” of “about $1,000,000,” with Mantle and Maris “dividing a guaranty of $50,000.”2

On February 7, 1962, the Times reported that the duo was “heading for Fort Lauderdale … but not for baseball. For the next few weeks they will be here strictly as actors, appearing in the Columbia picture ‘Safe At Home!’ Scenes will be shot at the ball park and at the club’s quarters in the Yankee Clipper Hotel.”3 A week later, it was announced that star hurler Whitey Ford and skipper Ralph Houk had been added to the cast. The paper also noted a bit of off-camera drama: “…during the filming of the preliminary shots at near-by Pompano Lake, there was quite a to-do when one of the camera men, Irving Lippman, lost, or thought he had lost, a valuable ring. Mantle sailed right in and spent some fifteen minutes trying to find it in the loose dirt. When the cameraman returned to his hotel, he found the ring on top of his dresser. He was all apologies but Mickey assured him he should ‘think nothing of it. The exercise did me good.’”4

On February 15, the Times ran a feature on the production. “The Yankees went Hollywood today, and for more than four hours, Manager Ralph Houk’s well-regulated training camp became a merry shambles,” wrote John Drebinger. The scribe noted that the otherwise “obliging” Houk, certainly a novice at moviemaking protocol, gave the film’s director, Walter Doniger, full control of the ball park. However, “by the time the field was well-cluttered with sound trucks, cameras, ladders, wires and whatnot, Houk felt he had obliged enough.” The manager also was ill-prepared for the presence of the make-up artist, who was to groom him for his on-camera emoting. “For the Major is still a rugged military man,” noted Drebinger, “and the rouge and powder made him squirm. Especially when he found himself in the center of the astonished stares of the players.” Adding to Houk’s frustration was that his few lines with Bill Frawley had to be re-shot eight times.5

Ten days later, Drebinger penned another piece on the progress of the shooting. He observed that, according to Doniger and Tom Naud, Mantle and Maris “are not performing as actors but as themselves. Their lines are what they would say as ballplayers.” Drebinger was quick to disagree, however, given that “the jargon of the dugout could be a trifle rough.” But he added: “Mantle and Maris are doing well, so far. Mantle, in particular, seems to be enjoying himself. He laughs easily and takes everything in stride. Asked whether he preferred being an actor to a ballplayer he replied: ‘Why, this life is a breeze. Shucks, in this business when you make a mistake you do it over and over and over until you do it right. Around the ball field when you misjudge a fly ball or let a third strike whiz by they don’t give you another crack at it.’”6

Drebinger reported that Doniger “insists that Mantle, Maris and the other Yanks in the picture, including coach Johnny Neun and some twenty rookies who provide background, have been a most agreeable surprise. ‘They’ve really amazed me,’ he says, ‘by their poise and the relaxed manner in which they handle themselves, especially in the outdoor scenes with spectators gaping at them from all sides. Even professional actors sometimes feel a bit self-conscious working under such conditions. But ballplayers, I guess from the nature of their business, are so accustomed to playing before a crowd that it doesn’t bother them in the least’.” (Drebinger also noted that one of the junior ballplayers in the cast was none other than “freckle-faced David Mantle, Mickey’s 6-year-old son.”)7

In retrospect, it is no surprise that Mantle and particularly Maris do not give Oscar-caliber performances in Safe at Home! What matters is who they are: clean-cut all-American champions being marketed as models for young American boys. And they are not the sole Yankees spouting dialogue. Whitey Ford speaks a line: “Hey Rog, Mickey. Houk wants to see you right away.” Ralph Houk has several interchanges: “Hey, Bill, can I see you for a minute. … What’s that youngster doing on the bench? … Keep on running. Run harder than that …” (For sure, the Safe at Home! screenplay was not penned by Ernest Hemingway.) And as the Yankees train, the names “Tom” and “Phil” are detectable. Could they be “Tresh” and “Linz”? When somebody cries “Pepi,” he has to be citing Joe Pepitone.

Actor William Frawley, far left, is shown in this publicity still with various members of the cast and crew of Safe at Home, including Mantle and Maris.

Also of note in Safe at Home! is the presence of Frawley, a lifelong baseball fan whose Coach Bill is a variation of the crabby but endearing characters he played on I Love Lucy and My Three Sons, his hit TV series. In one scene, the coach and Mantle and Maris pass the hours away from spring practice by playing Scrabble in a hotel room—and M&M gently tease him on his ineptitude at spelling. “Who says so?” Bill growls. “Webster,” is Mantle’s answer. “What club’s he with?” the coach responds. At one point, Bill dubs Mantle and Maris (who then were as celebrated as any big leaguer) a “bunch of mangy rookies.”

Less than two months after its filming, Safe at Home! was released theatrically to coincide with the start of the 1962 season. Its premiere was no star-studded Hollywood event; the film opened on a double bill with Chubby Checker’s Don’t Knock the Twist, another Hollywood product attempting to cash in on the era’s zeitgeist. Both were combined in their advertising copy, which was headlined: “2 GREAT HITS ON ONE GRAND SLAM TWISTIN’ PROGRAM,” with Safe at Home! featuring “The great M&M playing themselves! Big Buddies to the luckiest kid in the world!” Given Frawley’s popularity, he was spotlighted for playing “the tough, gruff, lovable coach.”

Unsurprisingly, the film’s reviews were at best tepid. New York Times critic Eugene Archer summarized the majority opinion by declaring: “Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris came up to bat in unfamiliar surroundings yesterday and went down swinging,” adding that Safe at Home! was “a whimsical little children’s film” and “minor league production.”8 Additionally, in order to be cast in Safe at Home! Mantle and Maris were afforded membership in the Screen Actors Guild, which made them eligible to garner Best Actor Academy Award nominations. But they were not members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which barred them from voting in the Oscar race. “They must achieve distinction as actors,” explained an unnamed Academy expert, adding: “It is not felt that their distinction is in the field of acting.”9

Almost four decades after the release of Safe at Home!, I interviewed a number of the film’s participants while researching Meet the Mertzes, a double biography of William Frawley and Vivian Vance, his I Love Lucy co-star. One was Tom Naud, who explained that Frawley “loved being cast in (the film). He loved calling Ralph, Mickey, Roger, and Whitey by their first names.” At the same time, Frawley only palled around with the stars. “I wouldn’t have been invited to talk baseball with him,” recalled Jim Bouton, then a Yankees rookie, who was one of the extras. “That was for Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and the big guys, like Whitey Ford. I was just happy to be asked to be an extra in the movie, for which I got paid the munificent sum of $50.”10 (According to the New York Times, the rookies “had [each] received $100 for romping on the field.”)11

As for Mantle and Maris, Walter Doniger offered a take on the ballplayers that was far-removed from what he told the press during the shoot. Doniger described them as “pretty arrogant and ego-driven.” To convince them to respond to his directorial cues, he determined that “the best thing I could do would be to pretend total ignorance of baseball, and not know who they were. One time, I said to them, ‘I’d like in this scene for you to run not counterclockwise but clockwise around the bases. ‘They looked at me and said, ‘You can’t do that in baseball.’” Doniger added: “I would deliberately get their names reversed, so that they kept trying to prove to me that they were important. I thought the best thing to do would be to make them ordinary people to me, and not big league stars and world heroes. So I did that, and it seemed to work.’”12

Whether the M&M boys were model citizens during the shoot, or haughty superstars, or something in between, what matters today is that Safe at Home!, while no Pride of the Yankees or 61*, does offer a nostalgic snapshot of a moment in time. (And speaking of 61*, wouldn’t Billy Crystal—famed Yankees fan who celebrated his sixtieth birthday by DH-ing in a 2008 spring training game in Tampa—have made a perfect Hutch Lawton?)

ROB EDELMAN teaches film history courses at the University at Albany. He is the author of Great Baseball Films and Baseball on the Web, and is co-author (with his wife, Audrey Kupferberg) of Meet the Mertzes, a double biography of I Love Lucy ’s Vivian Vance and famed baseball fan William Frawley, and Matthau: A Life. He is a film commentator on WAMC (Northeast) Public Radio and a contributing editor of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. He is a frequent contributor to Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game and has written for Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond, Total Baseball, Baseball in the Classroom, Memories and Dreams, and NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. His essay on early baseball films appears on the DVD Reel Baseball: Baseball Films from the Silent Era, 1899–1926, and he is an interviewee on the director’s cut DVD of The Natural.

SAFE AT HOME!
CREDITS

DIRECTOR: Walter Doniger.
PRODUCER: Tom Naud.
SCREENPLAY: Robert Dillion, based on a story by Naud and Steve Ritch.
MUSIC: Van Alexander.
A NAUD-HAMILBURG PRODUCTION.
CAST: Mickey Mantle (Himself); Roger Maris (Himself); William Frawley (Bill Turner); Patricia Barry (Johanna Price);
Don Collier (Ken Lawton); Eugene Iglesias (Mr. Torres); Flip Mark (Henry); Bryan Russell (Hutch Lawton); Scott Lane (Mike Torres); Charles G. Martin (Henry’s Father); Ralph Houk (Himself); Whitey Ford (Himself).

NOTE: Approximately twenty Yankee rookies and other team personnel appear unbilled. Cast as one of the young ballplayers, also unbilled, is David Mantle, Mickey’s son.

Notes

1. Robert Creamer, “Mantle and Maris in the Movies.” Sports Illustrated, April 2, 1962, 96–108.

2. John Drebinger, “Teamwork on the Citrus Circuit.” New York Times, February 25, 1962, X7.

3. John Drebinger, “Toothpick Bat: Weighty Topic in Yanks’ Camp.” New York Times, February 7, 1962, 59.

4. John Drebinger, “Two Infielders Figure in Plans.” New York Times, February 14, 1962, 29.

5. John Drebinger, “Houk Gets Some Coaching, Hollywood Style.” New York Times, February 15, 1962, 32.

6. John Drebinger, “Teamwork on the Citrus Circuit.” New York Times, February 25, 1962, X7.

7. Drebinger, “Teamwork on the Citrus Circuit.”

8. Eugene Archer, “Double Bill at Neighborhood Theatres.” New York Times, April 14, 1962, 14.

9. Murray Schumach, “Mantle, Maris in Oscar Race.” New York Times, February 16, 1963, 5

10. Rob Edelman, Audrey Kupferberg. Meet the Mertzes (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), 204–205.

11. John Drebinger, “Houk Gets Some Coaching, Hollywood Style.” New York Times, February 15, 1962, 32.

12. Rob Edelman, Audrey Kupferberg. Meet the Mertzes. (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999, 204–205.)

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the site was the home of the Class C and Class B Greenville Majors. The Majors’ story epitomizes the boom and bust of small-town, independent minor league baseball in the postwar years.

At Majors Stadium, originally known as Phillips Field, crowds representing up to one-seventh of the city’s population routinely passed through the elegant archway on summer nights, sharing a communal experience that would quickly disappear with the advent of television and air conditioning. Such was the city’s enthusiasm for the Majors that it once attracted attention from The Sporting News. Community pride in the Majors led city leaders to build what was then considered a state-of-the-art minor-league facility. But with remarkable swiftness interest in the team faded. Now few citizens in the town of 25,000 know the rich history of the Greenville Majors and Majors Stadium.

MINOR LEAGUE BOOM

In the euphoric atmosphere immediately following the end of World War II, the number of minor leagues jumped from 12 in 1945, to 41 in 1946, to 59 in 1949.1 Attendance boomed from 10 million in 1945, to 32 million in 1946, and more than 40 million in 1949. The Sporting News noted that the record-setting attendance reached down to the lower minors. The Class D Evangeline League drew 575,000 in 1946, and the Class B Western International League drew 780,443.2 But just as quickly, the bush-league boom faded:

Television boomed, but it was not baseball on TV that was keeping the fans at home. For an evening’s entertainment a family could watch “Milton Berle,” “I Love Lucy,” and have the novelty of a dozen other shows. Earlier, people were looking for a way out of hot, stuffy houses; now, with air conditioning being perfected there was no need to leave home. 3

The rise and fall of the Greenville Majors mirrored the national minor league boom and bust. But the Majors’ rise was more metoric and their fall more abrupt than that of other small-town teams.

Ironically, in the era of the Internet and satellite television, minor league baseball has staged an incredible comeback. Obviously, many people are now looking for reasons to get out of the house. In 2001, the minors drew 38.8 million fans, the second highest total in history, and the most since 1949, when seemingly every small town had a team. In 2002, another 38.6 million paid their way into minor league parks.4

Even in major league markets such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Kansas City, and, yes, New York, fans are attracted to minor league baseball—even more improbably to independent minor league games—by outrageous promotions, low ticket prices, seats close to the field, and the family-oriented atmosphere.

Some cities and ballparks somehow defied history. Minor leaguers have played ball at Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, since around 1892. But, more typically, the revival of minor league ball has represented a rebirth. Since 1995, 78 new minor league ballparks have been built.5 What baseball fans of the early 1950s abandoned as obsolete, their grandchildren have reclaimed, too late for the Greenville Majors and many other teams like them.

Class D minor league teams had played in Greenville in 1905-07, 1912, and from 1921 to 1926. The teams had been known by various names, including Hunters, Highlanders, Togs, and Staplers, and played in various leagues, including the North Texas, Texas-Oklahoma and East Texas Leagues.6 

Origins of Phillips Field

The 1906 Greenville Hunters played in the Texas League, then Class D, with big-city teams in Dallas and Fort Worth. Joseph W. Gardner, the owner of the Dallas franchise, put up the money to place the team in Greenville. Low attendance caused the league to drop the Greenville and Temple franchises for the second half of the season. Don Curtis, who later became a St. Louis Cardinal scout and signed Dizzy Dean, managed the Hunters. 7

These early teams played at the “Younger lot” on East Lee Street; Haynes Park, northeast of Majors Stadium, “clear across the railroad”; Morrow Park on the city’s far northwest side; Pickens Park (which burned) and later Urquhart Park on “Puddin’ Hill” on the far southeast side of the city; and the old Hunt County Fair Grounds on East Stanford Street. 8

By the end of the booming 1920s, the citizens of Greenville decided that the city needed an athletic facility that compared favorably with rival cities. In 1929, Mrs. F. J. (Eula Lasater) Phillips made a $3,500 donation to the Greenville Athletic Council to buy the property. It was named for her and her late husband, Frank, a local bank president. Unlike today’s tax-supported projects, funding for the new stadium came entirely from citizen contributions. At the meeting in which Mrs. Phillips’ donation was announced, “enthusiasm ran riot,” and immediately Athletic Council members pledged $1,400 for the project.9

The Greenville Baseball Club, a citizens group that was contemplating the acquisition of a new minor league team, donated $1,800 that remained from the liquidation of the previous minor league team three years before to the Greenville Athletic Association. Individual citizens donated the remainder of the necessary funding.10

Although the facility was created to serve the immediate needs of the high school football team, planners conceived from the beginning that it might also serve a minor league professional baseball team at some point. “[The Building and Grounds] committee voted that the next step in the stadium program should be the erection of a baseball grandstand,” the Greenville Morning Herald reported.11 The newspaper did not report how the field would accommodate both football and baseball, with separate grandstands.

Phillips Field, with an original seating capacity of 2,960, hosted its first event on October 4, 1929, when the Greenville High School Lions hosted Dallas’ Oak Cliff High School Leopards in a football game.12 On December 31, the Greenville Athletic Association turned Phillips Field over to the city of Greenville, but the property was to be managed by the Greenville Public Schools.13

Coach Henry Frnka led the Lions in the undefeated, state championship season of 1933. 14 At the time Texas high school football teams played for a single state championship; no classifications based on school enrollment existed. They defeated Dallas Tech 21-0 for the championship at the Cotton Bowl (then “Fair Park Stadium”) in Dallas.15

Frnka coached the Lions from 1931 to 1935, then left Greenville to begin college coaching, serving as an assistant coach at Vanderbilt and Temple Universities from 1936 to 1940. He later was named to the Texas High School Coaches Hall of Honor. 

Minor League Baseball Returns to Greenville

In the postwar boom of 1946, a minor league professional team finally took up residence at Phillips Field. The Greenville Baseball Club raised $22,000 in the sale of stock from local businesses and individuals to place a team in the Class C East Texas League.16 The team was named the “Majors” in honor of the first young man from Greenville killed in World War II, Truett Majors.17 “We had just emerged victoriously in World War II,” Joe Phillips, the grandson of Frank and Eula Phillips, baseball historian and collector, remembered. “We were proud of that and had local guys like Monty Stratton, who was still trying to pitch with one leg, and Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in World War II. There was a lot to celebrate and feel good about.”

The club bought Phillips Field from the school district for $6,000. For the 1946 season, the long, straight wooden football grandstand on the west side of the property served as the ballpark’s primary seating. The visitors’ bleachers on the east side were razed to make way for the baseball outfield. “Home plate will be directly in front of the old 50-yard-line marker on the west side with the playing field to the east,” a Greenville Morning Herald article explained. The park’s symmetrical dimensions were about 320 feet down the left and right field lines and 400 feet to center.18 The outfield fence was “of metal construction and is there to stay, with no possibility of destruction by fire,” the newspaper reported.19 The 75-cent reserved seats were located between the 20-yard lines. The Greenville High School football team played the 1946 season at the park, and then moved to a new stadium across town, also named Phillips Field, which still stands.

In Greenville, a city infamous for the well-intentioned but thoughtless slogan “the blackest land, the whitest people” (“whitest” meaning “most honest” or “most decent”), segregation still ruled the day in 1946. The newspaper article describing the conversion of the football stadium into a baseball park explained that the lumber from the razed visitors’ bleachers was “being stacked for use in erecting a Negro bleachers at the north end of the playing field.”

Hungry for baseball and good times after four years of world war, Greenville fans attended Majors games in droves, despite a slow start that kept the team in the second division of the East Texas League until the latter part of the season. The regular-season attendance of 160,186 (reported by some sources as 167,000) has been reported as a Class C full-season attendance record.20

Unfortunately, the attendance record is doubtful. A record book of minor-league baseball shows that Greensboro, North Carolina, of the Class C Carolina League, reported attendance of 171,801 in 1946. 21 But the Greenville fans’ support of the Majors in 1946 is remarkable nonetheless. U.S. Census figures show Greensboro had a 1950 population of more than 74,000, and it surely would have been several times larger than Greenville in 1946. The Majors averaged 2,460 fans per game in 1946, meaning about 17% of the city’s 1946 population of 14,000 attended a game on any given night. By comparison, if 17% of New York City’s 1950 population of more than 7.8 million attended a single baseball game, the attendance would have been more than 1.3 million.

A TSN article on the Majors’ attendance referred to Greenville as “the biggest little town in Organized Ball.” The article noted that the Majors’ attendance was more than the total attendance for the entire East Texas League in the last two seasons before World War II, and that the attendance was greater than that of several Class AA Texas League teams, all playing in cities at least six times larger than Greenville. Thanks largely to Greenville, in 1946 the East Texas League led Class C baseball in attendance with 700,000.

The Majors made a strong impression on at least one veteran baseball fan. In a note to a friend, an unidentified writer remembered going to a Greenville Togs game in 1922. “They sure play a classier brand of ball here now than in 1922. This is big-time stuff now,” the writer enthused.22

Greenville fans showed a fierce passion for baseball in 1946-47. The Majors met the Henderson Oilers in a best-of-seven East Texas League playoff series in 1946. Rabid fans from both cities traveled with their teams, and tempers flared on both sides. In the first game, played at Phillips Field, an overflow crowd estimated at 5,000 turned out to see the Majors win, 5-3. The seventh game of the series had to be moved from Henderson to the neutral site of Texarkana after near-riot conditions in Henderson at the sixth game. League president J. Walter Morris ordered the change, calling the Henderson fans’ abuse of the Greenville players “a disgrace to organized baseball.” At least one Greenville player was attacked by a Henderson fan.23

But apparently the Greenville fans themselves had been less than perfect models of decorum. Prior to the sixth game, a reporter with the Henderson newspaper, anticipating that the Oilers would win and force a seventh game in Henderson, wrote: “The seventh and deciding game will be played at the Oiler stadium, in a city where fans have a sense of fair play and decency. There will be no more games this year in Greenville.”24 Two thousand Greenville fans traveled more than 120 miles to Texarkana for the deciding game, only to see their team lose to Henderson, 12-6.

“When the playoffs came against Henderson, there absolutely was a fever about the town,” Joe Phillips remembers. “Dad was afraid to take me to the home games because there had been fights at the games in Henderson. A person couldn’t buy a ticket for the playoffs. Prior to that I had taken my good friend to the games with us. I had already asked him to go with me to the game, but Dad couldn’t take him. I lost a friend after he came over to the house and we had to tell him that we didn’t have a ticket for him.”25

“My favorite players were power hitter Dean Stafford and Gibby Brack, who had played in the major leagues during the 1930s,” says Phillips. Brack played in 315 games for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies from 1937 to 1939, hitting .279 with 16 home runs. “Center fielder Eddie Palmer was the ‘Frank Sinatra’ of the team. A nice-looking guy, he was a fast runner with a head-back style. He would run out from under his cap regularly, to the delight of the fans and especially the girls.” Forty four-year-old Sal Gliatto, who spent the 1930 season with the Cleveland Indians, pitched for the Majors and managed the club early in the season. On June 1, first baseman Alex Hooks replaced Gliatto as manager.

The support for the local team seems quaint by today’s standards. Before the series with Henderson, the newspaper reported that a group of 30 businessmen had pledged to reward the players. “Each Major player will get $5 for each hit he gets during the series. He will also get $5 for a sacrifice hit or an outfield fly that advances a base runner,” the paper reported. Pitchers would share $25 for a win. A pitcher going the full game would keep the whole $25 for himself. 26

”After supper, we would sit back on the porch and talk,” Majors fan Marie Heidmann told the Greenville Herald Banner many years later. ”A little after seven p.m., we would hear the sounds from Phillips Field. It would start with ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame.’ So up we went to the ball game. That really was a wonderful, wonderful time. People didn’t have to pay a lot to see a baseball game. [In 1946, Majors general-admission ticket prices were 25 cents for children and 50 cents for adults with reserved seats going for 75 cents. Season tickets were $4.] It was family entertainment. Those were the nicest boys and they could play, too.” Mrs. Heidmann remembered once deciding to stay home and listen to the game on the radio, but the announcer’s excited description of a Gibby Brack homer proved too much to stand; the family headed to the ballpark.27

Majors Stadium Replaces Phillips Field

For the 1947 season, the Greenville Baseball Club demolished the old wooden football stands. Baseball stands, built of steel and concrete in a semicircle from third base to first base and seating about 3,600, were constructed. The Greenville Baseball Club sold stock to raise the money to build the concrete and steel grandstand, which was modeled after Burnett Park in Texarkana.

The new park, christened Majors Stadium, was considered one of the most modern in this part of the country. “I recall that the stands were painted in forest green,” Phillips said. “There were [open] concrete areas where folding chairs were set up for reserved box seats, close to the field. There were two entrances to the seats behind home plate and entrances and ramps on the first- and third-base sides. A roof protected those in the upper part of the stands from the rain. The press box seemed large and adequate to accommodate radio and print news with a fine view behind and above home plate.

“It never dawned on me that we had a state-of-the-art baseball park until later when I visited and/or played in the ballparks in places like Paris, Gainesville, Sulphur Springs, Sherman, Denison, Tyler, and Marshall. I was told by one source much later that Greenville and the park in Kilgore were the prettiest and nicest minor league parks in East Texas.”

Joe Phillips recalls the fun of hanging around the ballpark as a boy. A favorite pastime was collecting used soda bottles. “Those were the days when there were no paper cups and the bottles could be returned for refilling to the plant,” he remembered. “I think we got one or two cents a return and it seemed like a lot of fun. Of course, trying to get foul balls before the ‘official ball chaser’ – Hilly Brown – was challenging, and always rewarding if you could get a ball.”

With a brand-new ballpark in place, the Majors rose to the Class B Big State League for the 1947 season. Although finishing the regular season in second place, one game behind Texarkana, the team won 100 games. Greenville again led the league in attendance, but, ominously, with an excellent team and a new park, attendance fell to 154,356. Still, the Majors far outdrew the Austin franchise of the Big State League.

An overflow crowd of 4,101 turned out for the Majors’ 8-3 win over the Wichita Falls Spudders. The big attraction was the wedding of Stafford and Frances Erwin. The couple walked beneath an arc of bats held aloft by an “honor guard” of players from both teams. The Majors lost a playoff series to Wichita Falls, four games to two. 

DiMaggio, Yankees Grace Majors Stadium

As suddenly as the passion for the Majors began, it cooled. In 1948, the Majors fell to last place in the Big State League, and attendance accordingly fell by more than half, to 67,334. The Majors, who led their league in attendance by a wide margin in each of their first two years, attracting national attention, suddenly found themselves dead last in paid admissions.

“Greenville had a very bad baseball team in 1948,” Phillips explained. “Earlier stars had departed and there was dissension among the fans and loyal team backers. Greenville was not going to support a loser.”

But on a chilly Sunday afternoon, April 10, 1949, the little ball yard enjoyed its greatest glory, playing host to big-league royalty, the New York Yankees. Casey Stengel, in his first season, managed the team, and the immortal Joe DiMaggio roamed center field. 28 Hall of Fame broadcaster Mel Allen described the game for radio listeners in New York. But the Majors were not content to simply set foot on the same field as the perennial world champions: The minor leaguers actually beat the Yanks that day, 4-3.

In those days it was common for major league teams to barnstorm their way through the south in the last days of spring training, prior to moving north for the start of the regular season. Following the disappointing 1948 season, the Greenville Baseball Club entered into a lease agreement for the Majors and the ballpark with George Schepps of Dallas, the longtime owner of the Dallas Texas League team and several other clubs. Schepps had enough influence to bring the Yankees to Greenville.

Tellingly, the game did not draw a capacity crowd to Majors Stadium. A crowd of 2,951 attended the game, considerably less than the stadium’s capacity of about 3,600. A heavy rain the night before had soaked the field, and rained out a scheduled game against a Chicago Cubs B squad. Apparently some believed the Yankee game had also been rained out. A New York Times account of the game said: “Rains and unseasonable cold resulted in a disappointing crowd.” The weather report in the Dallas Morning News the following day said the day’s high temperature in Dallas, 50 miles west, had been 59 degrees.

Despite the weather, the Majors earned their victory. DiMaggio started in center field, and had a single and scored a run in two at bats. Ace pitcher Allie Reynolds started on the mound for the Yankees, and pitched five innings, giving up three runs on five hits. Other well-known Yankees, such as second baseman George Stirnweiss, shortstop Jerry Coleman, third baseman Bobby Brown (who went on to become president of the American League), and right fielder Gene Woodling played in the game. But the Yanks, perhaps wary of playing on a soggy field, committed four errors. Still, they apparently gave it their best. “The Yankees took a full session of batting practice… and a regular infield workout despite the wet grounds and in every way possible put on a show for the fans that was well-appreciated,” a local sports-writer wrote. 

The game produced a mystery that remains unresolved. Playing center field that day for the Majors was Pepper Martin. Whether this was the former St. Louis Cardinals “Gashouse Gang” third baseman and outfielder John Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin, nicknamed the “Wild Horse of the Osage” for his exuberant, reckless play, is questionable. Martin scored the winning for the Majors in the bottom of the seventh inning, and had one hit and two RBI.

Pepper Martin had played for the old Greenville Hunters minor league team in 1924 and 1925 before going on to a legendary career with the Cardinals from 1928 to 1944. He would have been 45 years old in April 1949, but in those days, many major-league players continued to play in the minors long after their glory days had ended. 29

Contemporary accounts of the game suggest that it was not the Pepper Martin who played for the Majors that day. The Greenville newspaper accounts make no special reference to Martin. The very brief Dallas Morning News account of the game makes no reference at all to Martin, but the story on an exhibition game between the Majors and the Texas League Dallas Eagles in Greenville on Friday night, April 8, 1949, refers to a “Charlie ‘Pepper’ Martin,” rather than John “Pepper” Martin. The New York Times story on the Yankees-Majors game refers to “Pepper Martin (not of the Osage).” Records show that Martin, whoever he truly was, did not remain with the Majors during the regular season. John “Pepper” Martin managed the Miami International League team in 1949.

However, some believe that the Martin who played for the Majors that day indeed was the longtime major leaguer. “The chances of another Pepper Martin playing for Greenville are slim to none, but neither the (Baseball) Hall of Fame nor (Texas A&M University-Commerce historian Dr. James) Conrad could guarantee the same Martin scored the winning run against the Yankees,” a newspaper article said. 30

Joe Phillips attended the game as a boy, and until recently held a baseball that was autographed by several of the Yankees and Majors, including Peter Martin. Phillips, a baseball collector, sold the ball recently and is confident the Martin autograph was genuine. “I’ve got to think that was our daring John ‘Pepper’ Martin. He signed on the sweet spot of our baseball and the signature looks like his,” Phillips wrote. Phillips believes George Schepps probably brought Martin in to bolster the Majors’ lineup just for the exhibition game with the Yankees. Indeed, the New York Times article indicates the Majors brought in some reinforcements for the game.

One other player in the Majors lineup that day played in the major leagues. Second baseman Elmer “Red” Durrett played in parts of two seasons, 1944 and 1945, for the Brooklyn Dodgers, hitting just .146.

The game foreshadowed the end of DiMaggio’s career. The Yankee Clipper reinjured a heel that had been operated on the year before. The nagging heel injury finally caused DiMaggio to retire after the 1951 season.

The Swift Decline

The 1949 Majors improved only slightly, placing sixth in the eight-team league, and attendance fell even further, to 58,500. The lease agreement with George Schepps apparently was not profitable for either party. At a board meeting of the Greenville Baseball Club on August 25, 1949, the directors passed a motion “not to be lenient any longer with G. Schepps and that the money that he now owes is now due,” although apparently the lease continued in effect. Apparently to keep the team afloat, the club later voted to borrow “a maximum of $7,500” prior to the 1950 season.

Majors Stadium enjoyed another day in the sun when the legendary Monty Stratton, a Greenville-area native and former Chicago White Sox star, pitched a game for the home team. A popular 1949 movie starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson, The Stratton Story, celebrated Stratton’s comeback from losing a leg in a hunting accident. On June 17, 1950, Stratton, using an artificial leg, pitched for the Majors in a game against Austin at Majors Stadium. Expected to pitch only a few innings, Stratton went the distance, giving up 11 hits, striking out five, and walking one in an 11-6 Greenville victory in front of a crowd of 2,951.

In 1950, still operating under the lease agreement with Schepps, the Majors regained their winning form, finishing 75-71, but it did not stop the attendance decline. As part of what was by now a general dip in minor league attendance, only 50,511 fans made their way to Majors Stadium, fewer than 700 per game. A crowd of 801 saw the team sweep a doubleheader from the Sherman-Denison Twins, 11-8 and 6-1, on Labor Day. It would be the final bow for the original Majors.

The team folded prior to the 1951 season. George Schepps and his partners paid the Greenville Baseball Club a settlement of $2,500, terminating the lease. The club turned down an offer to stage stock-car races at Majors Stadium, and instead allowed the park to be used for various amateur baseball leagues including the Hunt County League and the Little League games.

“I firmly believe that air conditioning and television were major factors [in the attendance decline],” Joe Phillips said.

“Instead of going to the baseball games, my parents and my family were now watching television at home or visiting friends where we’d gather to see wrestling or the fights. Before air conditioning, the ballpark offered a great place to ‘cool’ off before television. At least you could be moderately cooler and be surrounded by friends.”

Phillips also believes a general darkening of the post-war horizon played a role in the Majors’ decline. “By the late 1940s, Russia had dropped its first A bomb and the Cold War was just beginning to mount up. The Korean War was starting, and the optimism of the immediate postwar era had now turned to worry over the nuclear threat and Communism.”

Marie Heidmann felt a personal loss in the original Majors’ demise. “We [friends] would all sit in the same area, just like you do at church,” she recalled wistfully. “It was the thing to do in Greenville. But little by little, attendance went down. It really was sad.”

The remarkably tenacious Greenville Baseball Club remained active and brought professional baseball back to the city. Greenville again fielded a Big State League team in 1953. The Greenville Baseball Club took over the Longview Cherokees franchise. 

The Last Gasp

Dick Burnett, the owner of the Dallas Texas League team, operated the team under a deal similar to the earlier one with George Schepps. A strong opening-night crowd of an estimated 2,500 saw the new Majors defeat Texarkana, 6-3, but the crowd for the second game nosedived to 331.

Despite a good start that had the Majors in first place, the Greenville fans did not respond to the new team. The Majors moved to Bryan midway through the season. The team drew only 30,051 for the season in the two cities combined, and after moving to Bryan slumped to a 70-77 record. The team retained the name of “Majors” for the remainder of the 1953 season, and then took the name “Indians” in 1954. It played at Travis Park, which is still in use as a baseball facility today.

Greenville’s last gasp in minor league baseball came in 1957. The Greenville Baseball Club took over the McAlester Rockets franchise of the Sooner State League. The Rockets had a long-standing player-development agreement with the New York Yankees, which continued in Greenville. Again, the new team received the name of “Majors.” An estimated crowd of 700 turned out for the Majors’ first home game, a 6-2 win over Paris, and newspaper accounts show most games drawing about the same size of crowd. The Majors drew only 23,066 fans, but that was third best in the eight-team league. The Sooner State League folded before the next season.

The final season of minor league ball at Majors Stadium brought black players to Majors Stadium for the first time, at least as members of minor league clubs. One of them turned out to be a future Hall of Famer, Ponca City’s Billy Williams, who went on to enjoy a great career with the Chicago Cubs.

Unlike today’s minor league teams, the Majors of the 1940s and 1950s rarely held splashy promotions to help fill the stands. The 1947 wedding of outfielder Dean Stafford and the 1950 appearance of Monty Stratton were the rare exceptions. The Greenville Baseball Club typically would run a full-page, or even a two-page, ad in the newspaper for the season opener, but no more advertising would appear after that. “I’ve tried to recall if the Majors held any ‘special event’ nights, like cow-milking contests, donkey baseball, and so on, but I can’t recall that they did,” Joe Phillips said. Even in 1953 and 1957, the Majors enjoyed good daily coverage in the local newspapers, but, with minor league ball fading across the country, the exposure did not generate enough support for the Majors to buck the trend.

Years later, sportswriter Bob Franklin put the demise of the Majors in perspective. Musing on overflow crowds for youth-league games in Greenville, Franklin theorized that, in addition to the emergence of television and air conditioning, changes brought about by the postwar baby boom also doomed small-town minor league ball: 

For a fleeting moment, it makes an ardent baseball fan like me want to bring back the professional game, the exhilarating past when the Greenville Majors rode high in the Big State League and the diamond sport was a paying proposition …. Could baseball make a successful return? Would people surrender the price of admission? The answers are no. Baseball in the minor leagues is dead …. There’s just too much competition for the entertainment dollar. Go-carts, trampolines, bowling, miniature golf, skating, movies that are better than ever, and what have you have dispersed the entertainment dollar.

Admiring the family togetherness engendered by “kids baseball,” Franklin concluded: “There was family togetherness back in the days of the Greenville Majors too, but boys bustling with energy would rather play than watch. And parents, overflowing with pride, would rather watch their own children play than the adroit professionals”31

In early 1958, the Greenville Baseball Club finally dissolved and sold Majors Stadium to the Majors’ original president, automobile dealer J.P. “Punk” McNatt. McNatt bought the ballpark for $15,000, allowing the club to pay off its debts and donate the remainder to local charities. McNatt leased the park, renamed “Punk McNatt Stadium,” to the Greenville YMCA for $1 per year. In 1961, McNatt sold the property to the YMCA, also for $1.32

For several more years Hunt County League semipro and youth-league teams played on the field. Joe Phillips believes he played in the final game at Majors Stadium, a semi-pro affair, sometime in the early ’60s. “Felan Monk hit the last ball out of the ballpark down there,” Phillips said. “I’m sure that was the last game.” Charles and Billie Pickens, owners of the Greenville Transformer Co., bought the Majors Stadium property in May 1964, and soon razed the stands. The company still occupies the site. A building that stands at the northwest corner of the property on the corner of Houston and Church streets is part of the locker rooms for the old stadium. The brick entry that remains—ghostlike—at the southwest corner of the stadium site was constructed as part of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) improvement project in 1940.33

Mrs. Pickens told the Commerce Journal in 1986 that she maintains the arch “for old times’ sake.” Little League teams still come each year to have their team pictures made in front of it. Mrs. Pickens has rebuffed attempts to move it to a new, more prominent location.

The Greenville Majors—like other small-town minor league teams of the late ’40s and early ’50s—existed in a tiny niche of time, never to be seen again. It was the exuberant, optimistic period immediately following World War II, just before television cast its spell on the country, isolating neighbors in their homes. The children of the baby boom were still toddlers, and the grim specter of the Cold War had not fully emerged. It was all over almost as soon as it began, but for a brief time, the Majors created something very close to major league excitement in a small northeast Texas town. Life in Greenville and other one-time pro-baseball cities might improve in other ways, but it would never again be so colorful. As Joe Phillips recalls: “The ’46-47 team seemed to pull Greenville together tightly, a rallying place. I don’t think the city ever recovered that feeling.” 

DR. J.M. DEMPSEY is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of North Texas. He holds a Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, where he announced Aggie baseball on radio for seven seasons.

Notes

1. Johnson, Lloyd and Miles Wolff (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, first edition (Durham, NC: Baseball America, Inc.), 1993.

2. “Tops in Attendance,” The Sporting News, November 6, 1946, p. 20.

3. Johnson and Wolff, pp. 219, 263.

4. “Minor league baseball draws third-highest attendance mark,” Associated Press, September 25, 2002.

5. Pochna, Peter. “Majoring in family fun; Minor league ballparks go above and beyond baseball,” Bergen County (NJ) Record, August 4, 2002, p. A-1.

6. “Galaxy of Baseball Stars Paraded on Greenville’s Diamonds,” Greenville Morning Herald, May 9, 1950, Section 16, p. 1; Johnson and Wolff; Phillips, Joe. “Professional Baseball in Greenville, 1900-2000,” unpublished manuscript, 2002.

7. O’Neal, Bill. The Texas League, 1888-1987: A Century of Baseball (Austin, Texas: Eakin Press, 1987), p. 255-56.

8. “Greenville Fans Have Modern Baseball, Football Playing Fields,” Greenville Evening Banner, May 7, 1950, p. 4.

9. “Mrs. Frank Phillips Contributes $3,500 for Purchase Permanent Athletic Field,” Greenville Evening Banner, February 26, 1929, p. 1.

10. “Select Site for New Phillips Field,” Greenville Morning Herald, April 25, 1929, p. 1; “Executive Committee Selects Site for Phillips Field, Accepts Donation from Baseball Club,” Greenville Evening Banner, April 25, 1929, p.l.

11. Contracts to be Let for Phillips Field Stadium,” Greenville Morning Herald, July 4, 1929, p. 3.

12. Ibid.; “Phillips Field Be Dedicated With Game With Oak Cliff On Oct. 4,” Greenville Morning Herald, September 11, 1929, p. 3.

13. “City Accepts Phillips Field,” Greenville Morning Herald, January 1, 1930, p. l.

14. “Frnka, former Greenville coach, dead,” Greenville Herald Banner, December 20, 1980, p. 1; Dan Bus, “Only the Memories Remain,” Greenville Herald Banner, February 11, 1968, Walworth Harrison Public Library, Greenville, Texas.

15. “1933 Football Team Wins State Title to Thrill Fans,” Greenville Evening Banner (Centennial edition, sports section), May 7, 1950, p. 6.

16. “$22,000 In Hand Local Baseball Club Organized; J.P. McNatt is President,” Greenville Morning Herald, January 23, 1946, p. 1.

17. “Baseball Club Be Known As Greenville Majors,” Greenville Morning Herald, March 7, 1946, p. 1.

18. “Conversion Phillips Field Baseball Park Under Way,” Greenville Morning Herald, February 22, 1946, 5.

19. “Committees Are Named to Sponsor Opening Game Here,” Greenville Morning Herald, April 17, 1946, p. 8; “Baseball At the Old Phillips Field” (photo cutline). Greenville Evening Banner (Centennial edition, sports section), May 7, 1950, p. 4.

20. “160,186 Paid See Majors Play Here During Season,” Greenville Morning Herald, September 25, 1946, p. 3; “Baseball At the Old Phillips Field,” 4; “Galaxy of Baseball Stars,” Section 16, 1; Harrison, History of Greenville.

21. Johnson, Lloyd and Miles Wolff (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, second edition (Durham, NC: Baseball America, Inc., 1997).

22. Newspaper clipping. Collection of Erica McKenzie, Rowlett, Texas.

23. “President J. Walter Morris Says Final Game on Neutral Field Wednesday Night,” Greenville Morning Herald, September 17, 1946, p. 1.

24. Ibid.

25. Phillips, personal communication with author, January 3, 2003.

26. “Local Fans Make Cash Awards for Majors Series,” Greenville Morning Herald, September 10, 1946, p. 3.

27. Press, Brad. “One victory put Majors into ‘League of their Own,”‘ Greenville Herald Banner, July 10, 1992. Collection of Erica McKenzie, Rowlett, Texas; “Committees are Named to Sponsor Opening Game Here,” Greenville Morning Herald, April 17, 1946, p. 8; Heidmann, Marie. videotape of speech to Hunt County Museum, July 1992.

28. “Majors Win Surprising 4-3 Victory Over New York Yankees Here Sunday,” Greenville Morning Herald, April 12, 1949, Walworth Harrison Public Library, Greenville, Texas.

29. Herman Scott, “Blackland Footprints,” March 8, 1965, Greenville Herald Banner, p. 1; “Pepper Martin.” (August 3, 2002).

30. Press, Brad. “One victory.” 31. Franklin, Bob. “Poor Robert’s Almanac,” Greenville Herald Banner, August 2, 1960, 8.

32. “Punk McNatt Buys Majors Stadium-YMCA leases field,” Greenville Herald Banner, April 17, 1958, p. 3; Direct Index to Deeds, L-R, 1/1/54-1/1/65, Hunt County, Texas, Clerk’s office, “McN” section, 54.

33. “Donation made Phillips Field,” Greenville Morning Herald, March 17, 1940, p. 6.

Jiminy Christmas! By the great heavenly stars! Was Rickey Henderson born to steal bases?

You bet your sweet ephemeris he was.

Henderson was born Christmas Day 1958, a good day to be born if you want to grow up to be a big league base stealing champion. For that makes him a Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 19). In fact, he was born almost exactly 99 years after Hugh Nicol, the flying Scot, who set the old record (that still stands) of 138 back in 1887. Nicol was born New Year’s Day 1858. Another Capricorn speedster, Max Carey (born January 11, 1890), led the league in steals ten times.

Since 1876, 197 big league stolen base crowns have been won, and Capricorns have captured 29 of them, well above their fair share of 16.

But look at Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) like Bert Campaneris: They’ve won 31, twice as many as they should be expected to win.

Down at the other end of the list, the poor Cancers June 20-July 22) have won only three of the 197 titles. Latest to do it was Willie Wilson in 1979. Now there’s a man who seems to have figuratively outrun his stars.

What are the chances of such a distribution—31 on the high side, three on the low—occurring by chance? To find out, I asked Pete Palmer, statistician and co-author of The Hidden Game of Baseball. Pete punched some numbers into his computer and came up with the answer. This could indeed have happened by chance—once in ten million times.

Note that the top six signs account for 75 percent of all titles, the bottom six only 25 percent.

Note also that winter babies (Pisces, Capricorn, Aquarius) account for 71 titles, summer babies only 26, or about one-third as many.

Why?

I don’t know why, I just know that they do.

Palmer questions whether repeat winners should be allowed, saying they skew the averages unfairly. Personally, I feel that a Luis Aparicio, with nine titles, deserves more weight than a Topsy Hartsel, with one. So we decided to do it both ways—total championships and total individual champions—and let the reader take his choice.

Pisces leads the total titles list with 16 percent. It also leads the total individual champions list with 14.5 percent. However, since the second list is less than half as large, the odds go down dramatically. It is far harder to toss 90 heads out of 100 than to toss nine heads out often. The percentages are the same, but the odds are vastly different.

Anyway, the odds on individual winners came to 40-1. Statisticians say anything over 20-1 is “significant.” So, using even conservative numbers, the data pretty well rule out chance as an explanation.

Numbers like these intrigue me. A stubborn Scorpio, I began checking data in a dozen categories-Presidents, congressmen, Academy Award winners, Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and on and on.

Of course, I was especially anxious to check the old wives’ tale that Scorpios make the best lovers and wrote to Masters and Johnson to see if they had any data on that. They replied huffily that they don’t lend themselves to such research. A pity. Science will always be the poorer for it.

Meanwhile, you don’t have to believe in astrology to read statistics, and the data I found made me pause and scratch my head and ask “why?”

I should say that I also did a thorough study of biorhythms and sports, checking over 1,000 performances in baseball, football, tennis, track and field, boxing, and swimming. I must report that I found absolutely no statistical confirmation of this seemingly scientific but—I’m convinced—fraudulent theory. If anyone wants to bet on the World Series, the Super Bowl, or a heavyweight title fight on the basis of biorhythm alone, let him see me. I’ll be glad to take all the money he has.

On the other hand, astrology, which smacks of unscientific magic, produces numbers far outside what the law of averages says is normal. It seems downright unfair that a man’s birthday can give him an advantage in stealing bases or hitting home runs, but then life has always been unfair. Athletes are not typical of the rest of us. They’re taller, heavier, have better eyesight, better muscle tone, superior hand-eye coordination, etc. They also differ, I now must add, in their birthdays.

Table 1: Base Stealing Champions by Sign, 1876-1987

Big League Stars

Palmer was also skeptical, so like a good SABR member, he decided to do some scientific checking. He ran a massive computer study on all 9,388 men who had played major league baseball from 1909 through 1981. His read-out produced an almost perfect sine curve of births arranged along the calendar year:

If you want to grow up to be a big league player, Palmer found, you’d be wise to plan to be born roughly between July 20 and Christmas, that is from Leo through Sagittarius. The best time of all is late summer. Virgo (Aug. 24-Sept. 23) has produced 921 players, or 18 percent more than normal. In fact it leads at every position except shortstop and third base.

The worst time to be born is early spring, as an Aries (March 21 to April 20). Only 681 big league players were born then, 11 percent below normal, and 35 percent less than those born Virgos.

Incidentally, this is almost the same result I got in a study of pro football players in 1977. Virgo was way out in front, Aries next to last.

Suppose you throw 9,388 darts at a large round dart board divided into twelve slices and spinning furiously. Assuming that all the darts hit the board, what is the chance that 921 will land in one section and only 681 in another?

The chance, Palmer found, is over 700 million to one!

Of course, not all slices of the zodiacal pie are exactly the same size. Cancer has 32 days, Pisces 29.

And births are not distributed equally throughout the calendar. However, authorities disagree on which are the high-birth months and which the low. One study says Gemini (May 22-June 21) has the least births, Aquarius Jan. 21-Feb. 19) the most. But another study is just the other way around.

At any rate, the difference is not great, 15 percent at the most. It hardly explains why Pisces has more than ten times as many stolen base championships as Cancer.

But, strangely, Palmer found, although Virgos get on the team more than anyone else, once they’re in uniform, they don’t particularly excel. They’re about average in combined batting average and home runs among hitters, as well as ERA and won-lost records for pitchers.

About the only outstanding Virgos in big league annals are Ted Williams, Roger Maris, Frank Robinson, and Larry Lajoie. Virgos are supposed to be painstaking perfectionists. If that’s true, it certainly describes Williams at least. And if there is any validity to these data, then Ted, who had to overcome so much—five years at war, a difficult home park, a variety of injuries—apparently had to overcome his stars as well.

Batting Champs

Palmer’s study reveals another anomaly. Aries, the least likely to get on a team, are collectively the best hitters once they do land a job. Their combined batting average is .267. The average for all signs is .262. Leo (mid-summer) has the worst average, .259.

In fact, the batting average curve is almost the exact opposite of the total players’ curve, with above average figures in the late winter and early spring (Pisces through Taurus) and average or below average figures for the rest of the year.

My own study of 208 big league batting champs, 1876-1987, confirms Palmer’s findings: Two spring signs, Aries and Taurus, are among the tops in producing batting champions. Late winter and early spring are the high periods. All other signs, except Sagittarius, are average or below.

(If Scorpio Stan Musial had been born one day later, his seven titles would have put Sagittarius out of reach—for the present, at least.)

Stan is not the only champ to overcome his stars. The 1985 king, Willie McGee, is also a Scorpio. Wade Boggs has won four titles so far for the next-to-last Geminis. And Bill Madlock won four for last-place Capricorn, which proves, perhaps—as the astrologers admit—that the stars impel, they don’t compel. Long shots do come in. I just wouldn’t bet on them, that’s all.

Let’s look at the favorites. Taurus, Sagittarius, and Aries make up 25 percent of the zodiac but account for 36 percent of all batting championships, over half of all .400 hitters, and more than half of the lifetime 3,000-hit men. Two of the three, Sagittarius and Aries, have produced the six longest batting streaks of this century—Sagittarians Cobb (twice) and DiMaggio, and Aries Rose, Sisler, and Holmes.

The quintessential baseball Aries is Pete Rose. Who can forget the image of Rose barreling into catcher Ray Fosse to win the 1970 All-Star Game, a scene as indelibly engraved into the baseball psyche as the famous photo of Cobb flying into third with spikes flashing?

Aries are the “I am,” take-charge egotists of the zodiac; they supposedly love the spotlight and usually hog it in conversation and everything else. Aries lead all other signs in winning Academy Awards (Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Spencer Tracy, William Holden, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liza Minelli).

Capricorns come next to Sagittarius in the calendar, but they rank at the bottom among batting champions, with only nine. One of those was Elmer Flick, who won in 1906 with a .306 average, second lowest winning average ever.

Table 2: Batting Champions by Sign, 1876-1987

Home Runs

Home run champions show a strong preference for being born in the autumn and winter. All of these signs, except Capricorn, are average or above. All the spring and summer signs, without exceptions, are average and below.

The best sign of all for power hitters is Libra. Out of 220 home run titles won or shared since 1876, Libras have won 34, five times as many as last-place Gemini. Libra Mike Schmidt alone has won eight crowns. Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx, and Chuck Klein each won four, and Ed Mathews two.

Thanks to Schmidt, Libra has now vaulted into first place, overtaking the mighty Aquarians—Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Ben Oglivie—who had been kings of the sluggers until Schmidt brought the age of Aquarius to an end.

Darrell Evans is another one who overcame the accident of birth. He’s not only the oldest home run champ, he’s a Gemini, the least likely sign to lead the league.

The greatest slugger of all, Josh Gibson (962 home runs), was a Sagittarius. Sadaharu Oh is a Taurus.

As the chart shows, autumn through winter (Libra through Pisces) is the best time to be born if you want to grow up to be a home run champ. But the month-to-month swings are too erratic to sustain any simple seasonal theory; Aquarius, with 28 home run titles, for example, comes right after Capricorn, with only 13. There is obviously something else at work here besides the earth’s journey around the sun. If it is not astrology, whatever it may be deserves some serious study.

April 8, 1974 was a particularly good day for Aquarians. If Hank Aaron had let his eye stray from the sports pages for a moment, he would have read in Sydney Omarr’s syndicated horoscope column the following forecast for himself:

Advancement indicated. Views are vindicated. You receive compliments from professional superior. You make significant gains. Profit potential increases…. Standing in the community is elevated.

That night Aaron went out and hit his million-dollar 715th home run, the one that broke Babe Ruth’s record.

Table 3: Home Run Champions by Sign, 1876-1987

Pitchers—ERA

Pitchers show a different profile altogether.

Palmer found that there have been more Virgo pitchers in the big leagues than any other sign, just as there are more Virgos in general. Capricorn has produced the fewest pitchers.

Yet, Virgos are only average as a group once they get on the team. Sagittarians, like Steve Carlton, have the best combined won-lost record, as well as the best combined earned run average. Cancers have the worst won-lost mark, Geminis the worst ERA.

My own study of ERA champs shows that Pisces Steve McCatty and J.R. Richard have pitched their sign into first place among individual winners, edging Aries (Don Sutton, Phil Niekro, Cy Young) by 28 to 27. The two signs incidentally come next to each other on the calendar—late winter and early spring.

Yet, again, the month-to-month differences are so large they rule out an easy seasonal explanation. Aquarius comes right before Pisces on the calendar, but it’s dead last in ERA titles, with only seven.

Aquarian Nolan Ryan was really bucking the stars when he won in 1981. However, Aquarians are the only sign to produce one man who won all three titles—ERA, home runs, and batting. His name of course was Babe Ruth. (But note that Babe gave up pitching and took up slugging full time. Did his stars impel him?)

For four straight years, 1982-85, Cancer produced one of the two ERA kings—Rick Honeycutt, Alejandro Pena, Rick Sutcliffe, and Dave Stieb.

Table 4: ERA Champions by Sign, 1876-1987

Pitchers—Strikeouts

Power hitters differ astrologically from singles hitters. Do power pitchers, the strikeout kings, also differ from finesse pitchers, the ERA champs?

They sure do.

I haven’t counted all the individual strikeout titles won, but on the list of the ten top strikeout pitchers of all time, four are Scorpios—Walter Johnson, Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson and Jim Bunning. A fifth Scorpio, Bob Feller, would surely be on the list, perhaps at the top of it, if he hadn’t lost his four best years in the Navy. Two Scorpio youngsters will probably join the list within fifteen years—Dwight Gooden and Fernando Valenzuela.

Nolan Ryan, the all-time champ, is an Aquarius, the only one in the top ten. The entire list, as of Opening Day 1987, is below.

Will the day ever come when big league scouts will carry a book of horoscopes along with a stop watch and the other tools of their trade?

Charlie O. Finley, boss of the Oakland A’s, dabbled in astrology, though perhaps he was more interested in the astrologer, a beautiful redhead named Laurie Brady, than in astrology. At any rate, Brady predicted in 1970 that the A’s would win the division crown in ’71 and then the World Series three years in a row. They did. In ’76 Finley asked her to do daily charts on every player on the roster. Manager Chuck Tanner promptly threw them in the waste basket. Perhaps he should have read them: That year the A’s failed to win the division for the first time in six seasons.

Only one player has ever admitted to using astrology: Wes Ferrell, who won 20 games six different times for the Red Sox and Indians in the 1930s. An Aquarius, Ferrell “freely admits that his fortunes are governed by the stars,” Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich wrote in july 1938. “Astrology rules his life. He is a confirmed disciple and credits astology with curing the soreness in his arm when all other methods failed including the ministration of medical and bone specialists, quacks and voodoo doctors.”

Povich continued: “On the days the stars say they are in his favor he will be the picture of confidence on the pitching mound. He says that several years ago when he was with Cleveland he had his horoscope read and a re-check of his season’s victories revealed that he had won ball games on days when the stars were favorable and had lost games when, according to the horoscope, the days were due to be ‘bad.’

“He makes no bones about his faith in astrology. He points out that it was more than a coincidence two years ago at Griffith Stadium when, on the same day, Joe Cronin was beaned and Rick Ferrell suffered a broken finger. ‘It was a bad day for people born in the sign of Libra,’ said Wes, ‘and the chart showed it. Both Cronin and Rick were Libra babies.'”

Did it work? Well, Ferrell won 193 big league games, including 25 in 1935 to lead the league.

Table 5: All-Time Strikeout Leaders Through 1986

Note: The leading strikeout pitcher until 1987, with 4490, is Japan’s Masaichi Kaneda—who is a Leo.

Reading List

If astrology can predict the future, it should be able to “predict” the past. I went to two astrologers—Laurie Brady of Salem, Massachusetts, and Maude Chalfant of Washington—and gave them the birthdays of several athletes and asked them to describe the men, knowing nothing else about them. Then I asked them to tell what might have happened to each on a particular day in his career. Their readings follow. See if you can guess who the men were. Answers at the bottom.

I. Born: February 6, 1895. A very emotional chart. He either had an explosive temper or explosive energy, so if he were a baseball player, I would think he was one ofyour home run hitters, or a heavy-weight boxer.

He had sort of a tormented life, lots of problems. There were definitely problems in his natal home. His father or mother sat on him real hard. There was probably quarreling in the home, or a separation or divorce or loss of parent. He was extremely independent and hard to manage. There’s a very heavy emphasis in the House of Show Business, and Sports in general. He probably loved kids, and I would imagine he had many love affairs.

EVENT: October 1, 1932. I’m wondering, was this person having some health problems? It could be a chart where a person was retiring, or the end of his career was coming. It could have been home runs if this was a baseball player.

II. Born: August 30, 1918. He is terribly independent, probably was very hard to manage. He might have been frustrated, had to control himself, or was made to control himself. He has a fiery way of thinking, and fire in his hands. Anything to do with the hands would be good for him. I’m sure he had emotional problems, probably drinking problems, although I could be very wrong. There’s a strong emphasis on his House of Self-Undoing.

He’s precise, a Virgo, very exacting in details about everything. He has a quick mind, but he might have been sarcastic in his speech. He could have acted like a dictator to his friends. This is a psychic person, I’m sure, very sensitive.

III. Born: October 25, 1923. A terribly intense person, fixed and stubborn, but very sweet-natured, likeable, and very lucky. He might be a quarterback if he’s in football. He would be a power hitter if he’s in baseball.

EVENT: October 3, 1951. I think this event was a very happy one. The moon was touching Venus, meaning that sweet things were coming to him or being stirred up. Jupiter in his House of Work also means good things. Uranus, the planet of Change and Surprise, was exactly over his Pluto (energy). So, whatever this was, it was probably unexpected and very strong and explosive. And very fateful. It’s kind of hard to read whether it was pure luck or whether it wasn’t.

IV. Born: April 14, 1941. This is a strong, strong person. Super strong. A lot of self-confidence. He was born with it. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew what he wanted.

He’s aggressive. He was born with that too. And stubborn. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. He rushes into things, just shoots out and does what he thinks he has to do.

When he’s playing, he’s totally into it. His whole being—his brain, his body—are all working for one thing. He’s got tons of physical energy. His friends would think he’s courageous. His enemies would consider him pushy.

Sometimes he can be very strong-willed, rebellious, anti-social, when Mars hits him. All of a sudden he can turn into a really raging person. These are tendencies from birth; he may have mellowed since then. If his energy were all kept inside him, he’d probably hurt people. But he releases it physically in sport.

I would think he’s extremely dextrous. His timing is excellent. He moves like a panther. He moves beautifully.

He’s got a quick mind, like a hair trigger, Really, really fast mental chemistry. He had sort of a conflict with his relatives. he’s quarrelsome and independent. He was kind of noisy as a child, or could have been.

He would also have to learn the value of sexuality. I think when he was younger he would rush into love affairs. But I think he’s outgrown that. He’s very charming and attractive. he may not be beautiful, but he’s bewitching. He has this inner charm. It’s more than just charm. I see a little gleam in his eye.

But he’s better off when he does things on his own. Any mates would probably be jealous of him. He’s dominating, and he attracts people who have a lot of needs, especially females, very sexual, who want a lot and are very demanding. He’s sort of restless at home, a high-tension person, lots of nervous energy.

He’s creative, though he might put it all into his sport. He’s a lot more intellectual than people know.

I think he has a powerful position, because he has such drive, such energy. He needs power. He likes to be on top. If he were in politics, look out!

I like him, whoever he is. I would want to stay away from him with a ten-foot pole, as a female. But I think he’s dynamite. He’s a real power.

EVENT: August 1, 1978. I get the feeling there has been a lot of strife going on. He may have been very aggressive in the few days just before this. He’s so damn strong, you’d think he could overcome almost anything that goes wrong. But he may have been a little disappointed. Things may not have turned out the way he wanted them to.

V. Born: May 18, 1946. He’s a Taurus, which is a fixed, sort of placid, slow-moving person who is very interested in money. He’s very lucky with money. He might be a little erratic with it, but I think he will make good money.

He probably has tremendous energy and heavy hands. I’m sure he’s very charming. Probably women like him. He could be flirtatious and have lots of affairs.

He’s really introverted, except for his moon that brings him in front of the public. I think he’s ambitious and driving hard for what he wants, and the public pulls him out.

I suspect he’s a little hard to handle because of that stubborn Taurus sun: “Don’t tell me what to do.” He probably loses his temper very easily. He might have a tendency to flare up and speak more angrily than he means to. He’s probably impulsive and quarrelsome.

EVENT: October 18, 1977. A terrific massing of planets in his House of Work. The north node of the moon—the lucky part—the moon itself, the sun, Pluto, and Venus—which usually means nice things and gifts—are all in his House of Work. This was just a fantastic day with all those planets—half of all his planets—all in one place. On the whole, I would think this was a fortunate event.

VI. Born: November 22, 1950. I’d say he’s a sweet person, talks sweetly and thinks sweetly, perhaps idealistically. He probably likes to talk a lot, is jovial, likes people. He could be a good story-teller. Women like him.

A lot of energy. And he has the Saturn-Mars square found in a lot of boxers, so I would say he has power also.

EVENT: September 23, 1978. This is so complicated, I can’t make a flat statement whether it was good or bad. But it was of great significance, because there were aspects after aspects (of the stars) hitting his chart that day. There could be something very surprising about this event.

Saturn is right on the edge of his House of Career. Saturn is the planet of the ending of things, so this was very significant in his career and his life.

Was he hurt, or could there have been anything involving a hospital in this situation?

There was something mysterious, something about this whole thing. It may be that he had a sense of mysterious things happening around him that he felt very strongly. I sort of lean to something very disappointing, but I can’t quite back it up.

But there’s a strong emphasis on hospitals and health.

Answers to Reading List

I. October 1, 1932: Babe Ruth’s “called the shot” home run.

II. August 30, 1918: Ted Williams (I didn’t give an event date.)

III. October 3, 1951: Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world.”

IV. August 1, 1978: Pete Rose’s hit streak ends.

V. October 18, 1977: Reggie Jackson’s three World Series homers.

VI. September 23, 1978: Lyman Bostock is shot to death.