Backroads and Ballplayers #79
Stories of the famous and not-so-famous men and women from a time when baseball was "Arkansas' Game." Backroads and Ballplayers Weekly is always free and short enough to finish in one cup of coffee.
Future of Arkansans In the Show, Coal Belt League, Arkansas’ Favorite Dodger
What’s ahead for our Arkansas major leaguers?
Drew Smyly?
I like Drew Smyly. He has had some big moments. One of those was in the Field of Dreams Game of 2022, before a TV audience of 3 million or so. Despite the contrived hype, it was an unforgettable performance.
He has positively represented the Razorbacks, Arkansas, and Little Rock Central High School in the big leagues since 2012. He has a career record of 68 wins and 66 losses, and he had a pretty good 2024. He pitched in a club-leading 50 games. Smyly was the Cubs’ go-to guy in middle relief, but the Chicago decision makers don’t think he is a 10-million-dollar pitcher.
The Cubs declined their part of the mutual option to keep Smyly for the '25 season and will instead pay a $2.5 million buyout. He can come home to Arkansas and call it a career, but I am confident his phone is ringing.
Mid-Season Rehab vs. Off-Season Rehab
Our guys Gavin Stone and Jordan Wicks both had season-ending shutdowns after trying to comeback from injuries. Stone has had a surgical repair to his shoulder this fall and may miss all of 2025. We all wish him the best. I wrote about his situation last week. Link
I tend to think that “off-season rehab” will benefit both Stone and Jordan Wicks. Things slow down, getting back on the field is not an immediate goal, and caution is the rule.
My sources tell me that Jordan Wicks has recovered from his oblique issue, which it turns out was not entirely an oblique problem. A Chicago paper reported last month that the Cubs had decided that his late-season injury was actually a rib issue, which was causing “tightness in the area.” My friend Tom down in Conway tells me he has seen him this fall, and he “is ready to go!” So there you are…
Jalen Beeks is one of those relief guys that seem to always have a job. Like Smyly and Stone, he was born in Arkansas (Prairie Grove) and played his college baseball for an Arkansas team (Razorbacks). He spent last year in Colorado and Pittsburgh, where he combined for a 4.50 ERA in 70 innings. His strong finish with the Pirates could set up the 31-year-old for a good off season offer.
Jaden Hill (Ashdown, LSU) finished the season in the majors by giving up six earned runs in 10 2/3 innings in a late-season callup by the Colorado Rockies. The Rockies seem to like his future as a relief pitcher. He has one of the best fastballs among young pitching prospects. He can mix that 97 MPH heater with a changeup and sweeper. The 24-year-old Hill is expected to be part of the Rockies Opening Day bullpen.
Tyler Zuber (White Hall, ASU) began the 2024 season with the Long Island Ducks, an independent minor league team in Central Islip, New York, but by late July he had made the improbable jump to the Major Leagues. After two pretty good outings with Tampa Bay, the Rays traded him to the Mets. Zuber had a rough finish to the 2024 season in the Mets minor league system, but he is one of 21 pitchers on the Mets 40-man roster. He has major league experience, and he has a chance to catch on somewhere.
Jakob Junis (Jacksonville) declared for free agency on November 1. Junis was born in Jacksonville, Arkansas, but grew up in rural Illinois. He declined his $8,000,000 mutual option which earns him a $3,000,000 buyout. Although he is 32-years-old, Junis is coming off of an outstanding season. He pitched 67.0 combined innings with the Brewers and Reds. Junis moved to the fifth starter role in the Cincinnati rotation late in the season and pitched pretty well in that role. I can see a big payday coming.
Grant Koch (Fayetteville, Razorbacks) was promoted to the Pittsburgh Pirates for three games in late May due to a catching emergency. No matter what the future holds, he will always be among the 25,000 or so men who carry the title EX-Major Leaguer. He has all the defensive tools to be a big-league backup, but he is at a crossroads. With a limited future with Pittsburgh, Koch chose free agency to see how things go with another organization.
On May 29, Grant Koch caught a complete game for the Pittsburgh Pirates. His battery mates that day included rookie sensation Paul Skenes, and All-Stars Aroldis Chapman and David Bednar. That is a pretty good big-league memory.
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The Coal Belt League and a college guy from Harding
Last week in the Pope County Library, my friends in the research section gave me a newspaper clipping they had saved for me detailing a game played in 1936 by the Russellville Jeeps. The most compelling mystery of the semi-pro league that flourished in the late 1930s and early 1940s involved a pitcher for the Jeeps named Elwin Roe. How did a Harding student choose to spend a summer playing in a semi-pro league in the Arkansas River Valley? Why Russellville? My friends Scott Goode, Dr. David Jerome, and I are still working on those questions.
From the mid-1930s until World War II the most successful semi-pro league in Arkansas was that fluid collection of town teams called the Coal Belt League. The league included various combinations of teams representing towns from Morrilton to Fort Smith and took its name from the common coal mining industry in the communities that made up the league. Ozark (1939), Coal Hill (1940), and Fort Smith (1942) won semi-pro state titles during the years that the Coal Belt League dominated Arkansas semi-pro ranks. Although the state champion carried the name of a Coal Belt League town, the team that won the state title often had a new roster for the state tournament. Arkansas halted sanctioned state semi-pro championships in 1943, and the Coal Belt never recovered its place as the elite semi-pro league after the war.
Of course, Preacher Roe who played the summer of 1936 in the Coal Belt League would go on become a prominent member of the Brooklyn “Boys of Summer.”
“My grandpa played against Preacher Roe,” is a favorite Arkansas family story.
Arkansas Favorite Dodger - Elwin Charles “Preacher Roe”
“The best possible thing in baseball is winning the World Series. The second best thing is losing the World Series.” – Tommy Lasorda
The 1949 Fall Classic was the second of five championships Brooklyn would lose to the Yankees from 1947-1956. The only highlight for the Dodgers in that forgettable 1949 World Series was a pitching masterpiece by a math teacher from the hills of North Arkansas.
In the early 1930s, the week-end pitcher for the Viola town team was a country doctor named Charles Edward Roe. Although in his 50s, Doc Roe was still the best pitcher in Viola, Arkansas. Not only did he pitch and manage the team, but he also supplied the majority of the team members. His six sons filled most of the other positions.
Occasionally, the entire team was made up of Roe family members. The summer when nine men filed for Fulton County Sheriff, the candidates promoted their speaking tour with a ball game against the Roe family prior to the speeches. Daughter Essie was pressed into action as the catcher and her husband, Frank Talmadge, provided the ninth player. Creston, Glenn, Cecil, and Waymon Roe manned the key positions. Teenage sons, Roy and Elwin, were relegated to the outfield. Already better known by his nickname “Preacher,” Elwin Roe wasn’t quite ready to replace his father on the mound.
Elwin Charles Roe was born in Fulton County, Arkansas in 1916. He grew up in the yet to be incorporated, town of Viola, where Elwin’s fondness for an amiable local minister led to his nickname for life. The story goes that when Elwin was a toddler, he was asked to introduce himself to a guest. Obviously influenced by his friendship with the minister, he proudly stated his name as “Preacher” Roe. By his late teens, the tall, rail-thin, left-handed Preacher was the talk of North Arkansas. Doc Roe relinquished his spot on the mound to young Elwin, but the practical and cautious country doctor wasn’t ready to send his son off to pro baseball.
After graduation from Viola High School, Preacher dutifully followed his father’s wishes and enrolled at Harding College. He made his college baseball debut in the spring of 1936. Scott Goode, Harding University Sports Information Director and the authority on Preacher Roe, wrote in Hard Times and Hardball that Roe’s record in his first college spring was three wins and three losses. According to Goode, Roe struck out 66 batters in 47 innings.
The summer after Roe’s first year at Harding, he pitched in a crack semi-pro loop called the Coal Belt League. He pitched on week-ends for the Russellville Jeeps, the eventual league champion, and on weekday afternoons he pitched and played outfield for Dover in the Pope County League. Why he chose Russellville and the Coal Belt League remains a mystery. That summer in Russellville gives credence to all the “my grandpa played against Preacher Roe” stories that are so prevalent in the Arkansas River Valley.
In Roe’s second year at Harding Roe became an attention-getting star in both basketball and baseball When he struck out 26 Arkansas Tech batters in a thirteen-inning game in the spring of 1937, scouts and sportswriters quickly found Searcy, Arkansas, on the map. Preacher Roe, the left-handed strikeout wizard, was national news from coast to coast.
Despite the attention and numerous pro baseball offers, Preacher remained committed to Harding. In July of 1938, with his father’s blessing, he finally relented. The St. Louis Cardinals, North Arkansas’ beloved favorites, were now in the mix, and the $5,000 bonus looked too good to turn down. Preacher Roe signed with the Cards on July 25, 1938. The press called the Cards’ new prospect, “the Bob Feller of college baseball.” His friends called him “Sleepy.”
Less than a month after his signing, he made his very unpromising major league debut. Roe gave up six hits, two walks, and four runs in less than three innings. The Cardinals were forced to accept the reality that the National League was an all-too-hasty promotion for a country pitcher who had dominated Arkansas college baseball.
Preacher would spend the next five years in the minor leagues and post an unremarkable 43- 39 record. No longer part of the Cards future plans, St. Louis traded him to Pittsburgh in late 1943 for two obscure spelling challenges, Johnny Podgajny and Johnny Wyrostek. Leaving his beloved Cardinals was the first of a series of seemingly tragic events that changed Roe’s life and career forever.
That winter preceding the 1944 season, a tree fell on Roe while cutting firewood. The injury he suffered in the accident was at first thought to be potentially career-threatening. Remarkably Roe recovered, but failed his military physical, making him an attractive major league pitcher due to the player shortage created by World War II. In the next two seasons, he would win 27 games for the Pirates and lead the league in strikeouts. His next off-season injury was far more serious.
Unlike most Arkansas country boys playing pro baseball in the post-war years, Roe had a college degree and spent winters teaching math and coaching back near his Arkansas roots. Ironically, after finally establishing himself as a major league pitcher, his offseason work nearly cost him his career and his life. In January of 1946, Roe was coaching basketball in Hardy, Arkansas, when an angry referee threw a punch at the unsuspecting coach and toppled him into a steel railing. The injury sent Roe to the hospital diagnosed with a “skull fracture.” It would take weeks in the hospital for Roe to recover but years to regain his pitching form.
Preacher Roe reported to the Pirates for the 1946 season seriously weakened by his injuries. His combined record for the two seasons following his extended hospital stay was 7 – 23. He was at a crossroads in his career. Roe had pitched in 132 major league games in parts of five seasons with a losing record. The Cardinals had given up on him, and in 1947 the Pirates did likewise, trading him to the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Fortunately for Roe, during the hard times in Pittsburgh, he reinvented himself as a pitcher. No longer able to throw a blazing fastball past major league hitters, he became a craftsman on the mound with an assortment of pitches and excellent control. Despite a new skillset, Roe started slowly in 1948. His record at mid-season stood at 3 – 4 when he finally mastered the intricacies of his new control-based style. He was 8 -3 in the second half and the third-place Dodgers’ best starter by season’s end.
On the last day of the 1949 season, the Dodgers edged the Cardinals by one game for the National League crown. Preacher Roe went 15 – 6 and led the team in ERA. Roe won Game Two of the World Series against the Yankees in what he later recalled was his greatest day in baseball. With his family from Arkansas in attendance, he shut out the powerful Yankees on six hits. It would be the only game the Dodgers would win in the series.
The next season Roe won 19 games and once again led the team in ERA. The 1950 Dodgers finished two games behind the Phillies in the season of Philadelphia’s celebrated “Whiz Kids.” Preacher Roe was named to the All-Star team and became a fan favorite in Brooklyn, but his best season was still ahead.
His 1951 won/loss record of 21 – 3 was the best winning percentage (.880) in the seventy-plus years the Dodgers played in Brooklyn. Although Roe’s memorable year was the benchmark of an outstanding career, it was a season Dodger fans would try unsuccessfully to forget for generations. Bobby Thompson’s historic homer in a one-game playoff secured the pennant for the cross-town Giants and climaxed a heartbreaking tumble for the Dodgers, who blew a thirteen-game lead in the last 50 games of the season. Preacher Roe was named the National League Pitcher of the Year by the Sporting News.
Roe would have two more excellent years in Brooklyn, winning 22 and losing only 5 in two pennant-winning seasons. In 1954, injuries limited him to only 15 pitching appearances and he retired prior to the 1955 season rather than accept a trade from his beloved Dodgers. Ironically, Brooklyn finally defeated the Yankees in the 1955 World Series.
Revered as one of the greatest Arkansas pitchers in baseball history, Preacher Roe was named to the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1967, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame in 1976, the Harding University Hall of Fame in 1989, and the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 1998. Roe died on November 9, 2008.
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