Backroads and Ballplayers #97
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.
Hogs, Happy Birthday Pat, and more 1940s
Aloha Oxford!
As of Monday morning, Wehiwa Aloy is batting .380 with nine home runs and 24 RBIs. Kuhio Aloy’s batting average is .424 and he has driven in 33. Unless you were backpacking across the Ozarks, you know the brothers from Hawaii hit back-to-back home runs in the eight-run fifth inning that turned the series around on Saturday afternoon at Ole Miss.
I could not find anyone who wanted to claim that back-to-back home runs by brothers in a college game were rare, had never been done before, or who offered a list. I do recall that the Waners, Loyd and Paul, did it in a big-league game for the Pirates.
The Waners had cool nicknames. Paul Waner was 5’ 8” and known as “Big Poison.” Loyd was an inch taller, but as the younger of the brothers, he was stuck with “Little Poison.”
I understand “Koa” means warrior in Hawaiian. How about “Big Koa” and “Little Koa?”
It is way too early to know the value of winning a series in Oxford after losing game one, but it “felt” like a big series.
In “more fun with the early season RPI,” the Razorbacks are gaining on the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and Xavier. Nolan Live RPI
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Last week, I revisited the five pitchers who had 20-win seasons in the post-war years. In keeping with the 1940s theme, this week’s Backroads and Ballplayers Weekly features two lost stories of colorful Arkansans who played most of their career from 1940-1949.
Happy Birthday Pat Seerey
In 1993 and 1994 someone convinced Ted Williams to issue a set of baseball cards. I have a few. The cards actually look pretty good. Ted hand-picked the players who were included in the 162 cards issued.
Among those selected was an obscure Arkansas guy who had an unusual career. Cumulatively Pat Seerey did not have a long or highly successful stay in the big leagues, but he had some historic adventures and several headline-making performances.
The legend of Pat Seerey began in 1941 in his first professional game with the Appleton Papermakers in the Class D Wisconsin State League. He had left Catholic High a few weeks before graduation to accept a pro baseball offer, but Seerey had worked out some kind of agreement to receive his diploma later.
There's a new hero in this here man's town, one Pat Seerey from down Arkansas way and the pudgy, good-natured right fielder for the Appleton baseball club.
For last evening, Pat came to bat in the last of the ninth inning with a mate on base, one run needed to save the Appleton Papermakers from defeat, and two runs needed to pull the old ball game out of the fire. So, Pat took a toe hold and when the first pitch came down the alley, instead of letting it go by as the Papermakers often do, Pat took a gentle cut and sent the ball sailing high, high into the air, and over the centerfield fence.
The 3,000 fans who were watching the game went wild and members of the Papermakers squad galloped to the third base line to take picks on various parts of Pat's anatomy as he rambled the last 90 feet to the plate. And after they got through, there were the kids and all the folks Pat had to pass on the way to the dressing room. - Appleton Wisconsin
His reward…a new pair of shoes.
In 561 major league games, James Patrick Seery batted .224 with 86 home runs. His hitting approach seemed to be “swing hard in case you hit it!” Sometimes he did, and a few of those contacts made headlines.
James Patrick “Pat” Seerey, the “People's Choice,” played outfield for Cleveland and Chicago in the American League from 1943-1949. Although he only hit 86 home runs over the course of his playing days, Seery had a knack for special accomplishments.
In a game against the Yankees in New York on July 13, 1945, Seerey hit three home runs and a triple in a 16-4 drubbing of the Yanks. He had eight RBIs and scored four runs. Before his big day in New York, he had hit three home runs for the season.
Questioned by several people why he chose Seerey for inclusion in his baseball card set, Williams replied “Seerey did something that I never did. He hit four home runs in one game.”
Seerey’s historic game came in the last full year of his big-league career. On July 18, 1948, Seerey was playing in a meaningless game for the last-place White Sox in Philadelphia when he hit what turned out to be the game-winning homer in the 11th inning. It was his fourth home run of the day.
At the time, Seerey was only the fifth player in big-league history to hit four home runs in a single game. The Sporting News called hitting four home runs in one game “. . . the greatest single-game accomplishment in baseball.”
Pat Seerey is 1994 Ted Williams Card #152. He was born on this day (March 17) in 1923.
Bill “Square Jaw” Ramsey
In 1945, a promising 25-year-old rookie from the Arkansas Delta made his major league debut for the Boston Braves. Bill Ramsey hit a very respectable .292 in 78 games for the Braves, who played quietly across town from the more popular Boston Red Sox. Unlike many major leaguers who were in the big leagues only because the teams needed warm bodies to replace players serving in the military, Ramsey seemed to have big league talent. He had led the Pacific Coast League Sacramento Solons in most offensive categories the previous year. Ramsey was a good hitter, blessed with exceptional speed, and perhaps equally significant, his resume included a failed draft physical.
William Thrace Ramsey, known back home as Thrace, had obviously performed like more than a placeholder. Ramsey’s minor league history, and his success with Boston, made him a good bet to remain in the majors when the former major leaguers returned home and traded their khakis for their major league uniforms. The Braves decided otherwise. Although he had a successful minor league record and a good major league trial, Thrace Ramsey was optioned back to Seattle of the PCL in the spring of 1946. He never returned to the show.
Thrace Ramsey was born in 1920 and grew up an athletic prodigy in Osceola, Arkansas, a small Mississippi River town similar to those described in a Mark Twain novel. A star in all sports, Ramsey was recruited by the University of Florida as a baseball player and a pass receiver in football. After a year in Gainesville, Ramsey returned to Arkansas to enroll in another kind of higher education with a program of study that would enable him to pursue his boyhood dream of playing professional baseball.
The word around Arkansas was that if a young man had dreams of professional baseball he should enroll in the Greenbrier Summer Baseball School. The previous summer, Dr. Earl Williams’ school had about 12 “graduates” sign pro contracts after the session ended. Among those was Gene Bearden, another Arkansas Delta youngster, from a few miles down the Mississippi River in Lexa. The plan worked out well for Thrace Ramsey, and soon after the 1939 session of the Greenbrier Baseball School closed, he signed with Doc Prothro’s Philadelphia Phillies.
During the early days of World War II, American professional baseball and its fans anxiously awaited the counsel of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the game’s short-term future. In January 1942, with the profound shock of the attack on Pearl Harbor still fresh in American minds, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis penned a handwritten letter to the President asking his advice for a game Roosevelt loved. Roosevelt’s famous reply, known as the “green light letter,” encouraged Landis to allow baseball to continue. In his reply, Roosevelt advised Landis, "I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt 1942
Major league baseball continued, as did about 25% of the minor league system, but with more than 500 major leaguers and 4,000-plus minor leaguers eventually serving in the war effort, a shortage of quality players was inevitable. The unfortunate situation gave many men a fleeting chance to play pro baseball. The new major leaguers were a combination of teenagers too young for service, baseball veterans past their prime, and men who had failed their military physical.
Ramsey spent the early 1940s changing uniforms and seeing America. In 1941, baseballreference.com documents statistics for him on six minor league teams, from Florida to Michigan. Ramsey was the property of the St. Louis Cardinals, and in 1942, he split the season between Cardinals’ Class B clubs in Columbus, Georgia, and Asheville, North Carolina. His combined batting average of .262, with quality players in short supply because of military service, was good enough for a promotion to Sacramento in the Pacific Coast League for 1943.
Sacramento had won the PCL pennant in 1942, but the military draft and major league teams looking for players had decimated the Solon’s roster. Team president Phil Bartelme summed up the Solon’s chance of repeating as champs in three candid words, “Not a chance.”
Ramsey was projected as the Solon’s starter in center field in the spring when he was summoned back to Arkansas to report for the draft. A few weeks later Solon’s President Bartelme happily announced that Ramsey had failed his physical and would return to California to finish the season.
Although he hit only .235 in 1943, Ramsey was a valuable member of the Solons. He was draft-exempt, and he could run. Despite spending time back in Arkansas, he stole 28 bases in 110 games. The next season he hit a solid .278 and led the team in hits, doubles, triples, stolen bases, and runs scored, earning his promotion to Boston.
The 1945 Boston Braves were three years out from their Spahn/Sain pennant year of 1948. They finished 18 games below .500, and although only All-Star right fielder Tommy Holmes was a quality big-league outfielder, Ramsey could not break into the regular lineup. Like many teams during the war years, the Braves seemed to be in a holding pattern awaiting the “real’ major leaguers to come home.
When decision-time came in the spring of 1946, the Braves chose to keep only Holmes and Carden Gillenwater from the 1945 outfield. Thrace Ramsey was dispatched to Seattle to become one of the top stars in the PCL. Gillenwater would hit a disappointing .228 for the Braves.
Over the next five years, Thrace Ramsey would play more than 800 games at minor league baseball’s highest level. He was a perennial all-star and consistently among the PCL leaders in stolen bases and runs scored. Inexplicably, baseballreference.com omits Ramsey’s two best seasons from his lifetime record. In 1946, Ramsey split time between Seattle and Sacramento. He batted .293, led the league with 219 hits, and stole 43 bases. In 1947, he again saw action with the same two clubs, hitting a solid .272, with 32 stolen bases. In a sport that loves its nicknames, teammates in PCL rechristened Thrace Ramsey as “Square-Jaw,” and the West Coast press obviously preferred the new tag to “Bill” or “Thrace.”
By 1950, due to nagging injuries, Ramsey’s speed was greatly diminished, and without that speed, his career in pro baseball was in a steep decline. In 1951 and 1952, his last two seasons in the minors, Ramsey’s batting average hovered around .200 and his stolen bases for the two seasons totaled only one steal. Finally, after surgery to remove a growth on the bottom of his foot left Ramsey without his primary weapon, he retired from baseball in 1952.
How fast was “Square-Jaw” Ramsey? In 1949, before a game in Oakland, the opposing managers staged a race between two of their fastest players. Oakland had a young infielder named Billy Martin who they thought was fast. Ramsey beat him badly in the impromptu race across the outfield. Oakland’s manager, Casey Stengel, who had already spent 40 years in baseball, declared that “Square Jaw Ramsey” was “the fastest man I ever saw in baseball.”
The question of why Thrace Ramsey never returned to the major leagues after his brief trial in 1945 has several possible answers. The most plausible is that Ramsey was likely very satisfied to be a relatively well-paid star in the Pacific Coast League, rather than move thousands of miles back east to compete for a major league job. His earlier experience in the big leagues had not gone well.
After a successful career that included over 1,000 games in the PCL, Thrace Ramsey retired to Germantown, Tennessee, about an hour’s drive from his family home in Osceola, Arkansas.
Ramsey died in Germantown in 1968.
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