Backroads and Ballplayers #88
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Baseball, Mistaken Identity, and Assumed Names
After enjoying some “non-baseball-like” weather, how about a Countdown to spring training?
Opening Day in Japan!
It has taken me a while to accept the fact that the best player in Major League Baseball may not be from Lucas, Arkansas, Commerce, Oklahoma, or even Mobile, Alabama…
OR the United States…
MLB gets that or probably got it years ago. One of their “missions” is to make the capitalized version of Major League Baseball a global product. Therefore, with a publicly unselfish goal to share our game with folks around the world, the 2025 season will begin on the earliest date in history. It is the right thing to do and has nothing to do with expanding a market. (hmmm)
The 2025 season will begin in Japan at the Tokyo Dome, with the Dodgers and Cubs squaring off in the Tokyo Series. The 2025 event is the latest installment of MLB’s WORLD TOUR. This year’s season opener will take place in Tokyo for the sixth time in MLB history at the earliest date in the history of the Great American Pastime.
Assuming the opening game in the two-game series will be an afternoon game in Tokyo, the game may not be over until tomorrow, or is it yesterday? Does anyone have that answer?
Mistaken identity stories…
My guys in Nashville, Scrappers not Grand Ole Opry, have added some details to my previous story about Carl Boles and led me back to a similar incident in my past.
Thank you, Keith!
On April 9, 1981, the St. Louis Cardinals stopped off in Little Rock to play an exhibition game against their double-A farm club. It was the spring of my fourth year as women’s coach at Arkansas Tech and one of the only times on a busy calendar that I could leave my post and see an afternoon baseball game at Ray Winder Field. My friend Harold and I planned our trip for days.
Harold was a serious autograph collector. His prized pieces were autographs that he acquired in person. A memory attached to a signature was the ultimate goal.
The Cards’ most recognizable player was first baseman Keith Hernandez. Hernandez had been National League MVP in 1979 and an All-Star and Gold Glove honoree for the last two seasons. Getting his autograph in person would be the highlight of my buddy’s year. This autograph would need a special display piece suitable for framing. Perhaps in his office at Arkansas Tech.
Harold had the perfect plan. Somewhere in a magazine he located an appropriate photograph and mounted it on a display board with Hernandez’s lifetime stats and accomplishments. It looked like something made by professionals.
In an unpredictable Arkansas April, the afternoon of Thursday, April 9, was a shirt-sleeve day at the ballpark. The Travs surprised the visiting major leaguers by winning an exciting 4-3 game, highlighted by a home run by player-coach Jim Riggleman and six innings of one-hit pitching by Andy Rincon, one of the Travelers’ most promising young starters.
After the game, Harold joined a group of fans behind the Cardinals dugout in hopes of getting an autograph from a Redbird player. In my friend’s case, it needed to be the right player. A half-dozen Cardinal players signed a few balls or scraps of paper for a few minutes, but the fan group dispersed quickly as the last major league politely headed into the dugout.
Oh well, Harold could mail his item to Hernandez. It wouldn’t be the same, but it would have to do. BUT WAIT, someone among the folks heading for the exits announced, “Hernandez in signing autographs at the dugout!”
My sidekick sprang into action. Without pushing a single youngster or cutting a forming line, he clutched his prized creation and waited patiently. The player kept his head down and quickly signed everything handed over the dugout gate.
When Harold’s turn came, he said something polite and handed his prized creation over the fence. Job well done! Without looking up, Andy Rincon signed his name across a Keith Hernandez photo.
Harold is now looking for his Andy Rincon autograph on a Keith Hernandez photograph. It is probably a “one-of-a-kind.” I will post a photo in this space, when or if he finds it.
Carl not Willie
I don’t know how many times Andy Rincon was mistaken for Keith Hernandez, but probably more than that April in Little Rock.
In an earlier post, I wrote a short piece about Carl Boles, an Arkansan who reminded folks of Willie Mays. “Reminded” might not be the exact connection. Carl Boles’ “mistaken identity” made national news. I did not have the space in that weekly post to give the Boles story the details it deserved.
Carl Theodore Boles was born in 1934 in Center Point, Arkansas, a rural community in Howard County at the intersection of US Highway 278 and Arkansas Highway 26.
According to an excellent biography in the SABR Bio Project, Boles’ father found a job in Kansas City when Carl was a teen. The family’s temporary move to Missouri provided an opportunity for young Carl, who had been playing on men’s teams back home, to play in a prestigious amateur league called the Ban Johnson League.
Boles was also an excellent football player, good enough to earn a scholarship offer from the Nebraska Corn Huskers. Before he ever took the field for the University of Nebraska, a scout who had seen him in the Ban Johnson League offered young Carl a chance in pro baseball.
In 1954, uncomfortable in Lincoln, Nebraska, 19-year-old Carl Boles took the baseball offer and an assignment in Danville, Illinois, in the Class D Mississippi Ohio-Valley League. Danville and the MSOH League played at the lowest level of pro baseball, but Carl Boles was a professional baseball player in the same organization as Willie Mays (New York Giants). Folks in Howard County were proud.
The speedy Boles batted leadoff, stole 46 bases, and led the Danville Dans in plate appearances and three-base hits. Somehow Carl got the feeling the Giants were not impressed. After the 1954 season, he joined the US Navy and spent the next four years in Long Beach, California.
After playing with and against some of the best amateur baseball teams on the coast, Boles started over in 1959 in Eugene, Oregon, with some of the Giants’ top prospects. By 1962, after hitting .337 in El Paso, Boles finished the year with the National League Champion Giants.
On August 2, 1962, Carl Boles became the 160th Arkansas-born major leaguer. The 1962 San Francisco Giants attracted a lot of attention as they fought their California rivals the Los Angeles Dodgers for a pennant that was undecided until a three-game playoff settled the issue. Although Boles was still with the Giants in the World Series, he was a spectator.
When the Giants returned home after winning the last game in LA, the crowd swarmed reserve outfielder Carl Boles when the team plane landed in San Francisco. Boles had hit .375 after being promoted to the Giants in August, but the attention was not because they thought Boles was the next Willie Mays, but because they thought he WAS Willie Mays.
Boles was about Mays’ size and build, and on road trips teammates made sure he was one of the first players off the team bus. Fans rushed to Boles with pen in hand, while the real Willie Mays walked by unnoticed.
In an interview with Sports Radio Service, Boles recalled, “I’m signing more autographs than the veterans. The only thing is, after I sign my name, they get mad at me. Even newspaper reporters come up to me and start to interview me. They’ll say ‘Willie, about that hit…’ And when I say, “I’m not Willie,” some of them get mad.”
While Mays was in the hospital in September of 1962, the San Francisco Chronicle commented on Mays’ celebrity status.
The wire photo of Mays in a Cincinnati hospital with a white band on his brown wrist was amusing, in a way. It isn’t likely that the youngest student nurse would mistake Mays for somebody else…Hospitals band everybody, like ducks and Canadian geese. — San Francisco Chronicle 1962
Later in the week, the nationally distributed wire service photo of Mays’ return to the Giants was actually a photograph of Carl Boles.
Carl Boles played in 19 games for the Giants. He had hit .337 at El Paso before the call-up. Boles was 27 years old, a good outfielder, with speed and power. He was definitely in the Giants’ long-range plans, but those 19 games would be Carl Boles’ entire major league career.
Although it looked like Boles was headed back to the big club in 1963, a broken ankle cost him the entire 1963 season and the Giants looked elsewhere. By 1966, Boles had found a spot in the outfield of the Kintetsu Buffaloes in the Japan Pacific League. Boles became a star in Japan where he hit 117 home runs over a six-year career.
Called upon in 2012 for a series of interviews with former teammates of Willie Mays, Boles recalled his two months in San Francisco, “You talk to Willie Mays for 5 minutes and I guarantee you he’ll bring up something you’ve never thought of about the game.”
Carl Boles passed away in 2022. He is buried in Center Point, Arkansas.
Although he lived his retirement years in California, the Howard County folks saw Carl Boles often. Many of his relatives still live in and around Center Point, Arkansas.
This response to my introductory story was shared by subscriber Dennis Ritchie.
In the early half of the 80s, I was working for the Nashville News. One summer day, Carl Boles walked into the office and asked the editor if the News would give Boles a letter stating that he was our reporter. Boles said it would get him into games (he was living in California). The editor consented as long as Carl would let us interview him. So I wrote the story about Carl's baseball life. He talked a lot about the Kansas City Monarchs and the control of the Japanese pitchers. He never brought up his "doppelganger' photo. I took one of the best photos in my short newspaper career of Carl. Sure wish I would have kept a copy. Carl asked for another letter from the News-Leader before he died.
More Mistaken (Assumed) Identity…Morley Jennings
William Morley Jennings is justifiably held in high esteem at Albion College, Mississippi State University, Ouachita Baptist University, Baylor University, and Texas Tech. He was a legendary college athlete, a beloved part of OBU history, and a successful coach and athletic administrator at college athletics’ highest level. He “probably” played more than 1200 professional baseball games. He played two games in the major leagues. Don’t go looking for William Morley Jennings’ stats in BaseballReference.com. He has none.
To his credit as a leader of men at a Baptist college, Jennings never really attempted to hide the fact that he played pro baseball under an assumed name, a “baseball name” he was stuck with even after he no longer needed to protect his college eligibility.
His false identity was so transparent that the state newspapers announced that the Ouachita College baseball team coached by Morley Jennings, would be in the hands of the captains while their coach was away with the Washington Senators. The next day the paper covered a local professional player, who was certainly Jennings, but wore a Senators uniform and called himself Bill Morley.
Complicated stuff, yes! I certainly do not have enough space this week to tell the Morley Jennings tale. Look for the complete Morley Jennings story later this month.
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Jim, enjoyed the story about Carl Boles. He was a very humble guy. Until reading your stories, I never knew how good he was. He certainly didn't crow about his abilities. By the way, Jack Bennett died last month. Both of us attended two baseball events that you were at last year-Hot Springs and Bryant. We enjoyed both.