The League of Mysterious Baseballists

Twenty-First and Lehigh is a painting by Thomas Kolendra

When I was growing up, I lived in a National League metro area.  The only games I saw in person were Philadelphia Phillies games, and all I heard on the radio or saw on television were Phillies games.  There was a Game of the Week with Dizzy Dean on CBS but it was not available in Philadelphia or any other city that hosted major league baseball.  Consequently, I became very familiar with the Phillies and somewhat familiar with the other National League teams, a mere 7 in those days.

Given that manageable number and less roster turnover (no free agency then) it was not too taxing to keep up to date with NL teams and personnel.  The American League, on the other hand, was largely terra incognita , and remoteness often goes hand in hand with mysteriousness.

When I started collecting baseball cards, Kansas City was farther away from Philadelphia than any other major league city; in fact, before 1958 it was farther west than any other major league city.  Yet the A’s had not always worn caps with an interlocking K and C.  It was hard for me, a lad of tender years, to comprehend there was a time when the A’s had called Philadelphia home.

In fact, the ballpark where I saw the Phillies play had been re-named Connie Mack Stadium (from Shibe Park) after the longtime owner/manager of the A’s.  Another revelation was that their presence in Philadelphia wasn’t a matter of ancient history but was within my lifetime!  Little did I know how many surprises awaited me as I began to explore the mysteries of the American League.

Of course, two-team (and hence two-league) cities had once been plentiful.  From 1958 through 1960, however, only Chicago held that status.  When the American League chose to expand in 1961, they put one team, the Angels, in Los Angeles.  This was just three seasons after the Dodgers had come to town.  To go from zero teams to two in such a short time span was puzzling.  Why did the American League do that while there were other big cities out there begging for major league baseball?  Mysterious, indeed.

And why in the world would the AL put the other expansion team in Washington, D.C. right after the previous team had skipped town due to lack of interest?  Not only that, the new team took on the same nickname as the old team!  This switcheroo was like one of those fairy tales involving changelings.

The American League remained shrouded in mystery because I couldn’t experience it first-hand (at the ballpark) or second-hand (on TV or radio).  I readily concede that someone my age growing up in an American League city might have viewed the NL as a mysterious entity.  Either way, the “other” league was like one of those parallel universes that used to pop up in science fiction stories.  Did it exist in fact or just in theory?

To be sure, there was coverage of the AL in The Sporting News , and even the Philadelphia newspapers carried AL box scores in the sports section.  Then there was that week in October (the World Series) when you could sneak a peek at an American League ballpark and American league players – regulars and back-ups – in home and/or away uniforms in glorious black and white.  The All-Star Game was a good opportunity to see the AL stars, and every other year it was played in an AL ballpark.  And from 1959 through 1962, there were two All-Star Games!

I had seen most of the NL parks on TV (Seals Stadium in San Francisco was an exception; the Phillies did not telecast games from Los Angeles but the Coliseum was occasionally on view in nationwide telecasts of football games), but the AL parks were almost totally a mystery.

The least mysterious team in the AL was the Yankees.  They were in the World Series every year (at least it seemed that way) so one got to know Stengel, Mantle, Berra, Ford, et al pretty well.  Thanks to those annual World Series telecasts, I had a pretty good idea of what Yankee Stadium looked like.

I remember my father, while on a business trip to Chicago, sent me a postcard of Comiskey Park.  To my mind it was a precious cultural artifact on a par with some King Tut relic uncovered by Howard Carter.  In those days there were no coffee table books with page after page of photos of current and former major league baseball parks.  So in my hands I held proof of that parallel universe known as the American League.  Or was it?

Some of those old post cards were obviously touched up, much the same as some Topps baseball cards were touched up after a player got traded and the color and team logo on the player’s cap were reworked to reflect his new team.  The results varied.  As Abraham Lincoln might have said, you can fool some of the baseball card collectors all of the time, you can fool all of the baseball card collectors some of the time, but you can’t fool all the baseball card collectors all the time.  Nevertheless, Topps persevered.

When I saw the White Sox play the Dodgers in the 1959 World Series, that was the first time I had ever seen Comiskey Park on TV – in fact, it was the first time I’d ever seen an AL team other than the Yankees on television.  Darned if the elevated camera behind home plate didn’t portray the ballpark exactly as it was shown on the post card my father had sent me.

So the White Sox and Comiskey Park became slightly less mysterious.  Not that I ever doubted what I was seeing on the tube.  Special effects were virtually nonexistent in those days so what you saw was a reasonable transmission of reality.  After all, why would anyone fake the World Series?  A moon landing maybe, but nothing as important as the World Series.

The one White Sox player who was familiar to me was Ted Kluszewski, whom I had seen play for the Reds at Connie Mack Stadium as well as in Phillies telecasts from Crosley Field.  There was no mistaking Big Klu, but his appearance seemed incongruous.  If anyone belonged in a major league uniform in a major league ballpark, it was Klu, but he just didn’t look right in a White Sox uniform at Comiskey Park.  It was like seeing Kukla, Fran, and Ollie on the Howdy Doody Show.

So the Yankees and the ’59 Go-Go Sox were not complete mysteries to me, but I can’t say the same for the other six AL teams.  Some teams had a player you immediately thought of when the team’s name came up.  At the top of the list was Ted Williams and the Red Sox.  According to his baseball cards, he started playing major league ball more than a decade before I was born!  Other stars included Rocky Colavito of the Indians and Al Kaline of the Tigers.  Those guys were nationwide (this was before the “face of the franchise” phrase became popular).

Of course, Topps put out complete card sets of NL and AL players every year.  From watching the Phillies, I recognized the cards of most NL third-string catchers, backup shortstops, and seldom-used relievers.  Cards of their AL counterparts, however, were complete mysteries…with a few exceptions.

Consider the case of Ken Aspromonte, a member of the Red Sox (even more distinctive today, he won the Pacific Coast League batting title as a member of the San Francisco Seals in 1957, the last season of minor league ball in the City by the Bay) .  I was familiar with his brother Bob, who played for the Dodgers (though he is now better known now for being one of the original Houston Colt .45s).  So in my mind, Ken Aspromonte was just one degree of separation from the National League.

Aspromonte was called up to the Red Sox in late 1957 to take over for injured second baseman Ted (given name not Theodore but Thaddeus!) Lepcio, who had been with the Bosox since 1952.  Every year Lepcio would show up on a Topps card with a B on his cap (and sometimes a residue of powdered sugar on his visage).  The stats on the flip side revealed a man of modest achievements (though he was pretty impressive in 1956 with 15 HR, 51 RBIs in 321 PAs).

There were many Lepcio-like players who showed up annually on Topps cards but were never named to All-Star squads and were never among the league leaders listed in the sports section.  Given their presence on baseball cards, they were neither nameless nor faceless, yet they were anonymous.  They were elite in one sense (there were only 400 MLB players total in those days) but they could usually go out in public without attracting any attention.

Then in 1960 Lepcio showed up on the Phillies roster.  He had been traded to the Phillies from Detroit, where he had spent most of the 1959 season.  This resulted in what I call a cognitive dissonance baseball card, as Lepcio’s 1960 Topps card (#97) displays a Phillies logo but portrays him in a Tiger uniform.  He spent but one uneventful season in Philadelphia but that was all it took for him to cease to be a man of mystery.  He was wearing a Phillies uniform (#4).

I saw him in person and on TV.  Byrum Saam, the voice of the Phillies, uttered his name on the radio!  Unfortunately, after a lackluster season in 1960 (his batting average was 12 points below the team’s dismal .239 BA), he was shuttled back to the American League (White Sox and Twins) for the final season of his career.

In those days baseball cards were essential if you wanted to learn more about obscure players.  Since Lepcio was largely a utility player (he played every infield position except first base), he rarely appeared in the comprehensive offensive statistics that used to be included in the Sunday sports section.  Basically, all AL and NL regulars were listed, from top to bottom, from the .400 mark (in the early weeks of the season) down to the Mendoza line and often beyond.

Pitchers were listed according to ERA.  I remember feeling gypped on those occasional Sundays when one or more of the lists had to be truncated due to space limitations.  The underachievers at the bottom of the lists were spared some embarrassment, however.

The Orioles were an interesting case, as they made the transition from underachievers in the 50s to contenders in the 60s.  Just as I had once assumed that the Kansas City A’s had always been in Kansas City, I also assumed that the Baltimore Orioles had always been in Baltimore.  Then one day I happened across some 1953 Topps cards pertaining to the St. Louis Browns.

These had been issued during my toddlerhood before I started collecting cards, little more than the blink of an eye in baseball history.  Looking at the Browns’ logo, a pixie/space alien cartoon character, it was difficult to believe a major league baseball franchise could permit such a rinky-dink image to represent the team.  That was a real mystery to me until years later when I started reading about the history of the St. Louis Browns and discovered they were a rinky-dink franchise.

Perhaps the lowest-profile AL team was the Senators.  Though the team itself was a mystery to me, even I had heard the old “First in war, first in peace, last in the American League” refrain.  And I’d seen that Damn Yankees! movie!  In 1958, what better AL team to supply a stark contrast to the mighty Yankees?

When I was 12, however, Washington was where I got my first look at an AL ballpark (I don’t count a mid-winter drive-by of Municipal Stadium in Cleveland when I was 9).  I witnessed a game at D.C. (later RFK) Stadium in 1962, the year the facility opened.

It was reassuring to note a few familiar faces on the field.  Mickey Vernon, the Senators manager, hailed from the Philadelphia area.  He was a two-time AL batting champion and seven-time All-Star. Also present was Robin Roberts, one of Philadelphia’s finest, now in an Oriole uniform.  Then there was Jimmy Piersall.  Even kids in NL cities knew he was a whack job.  Just look how he behaved in that biopic that came out in 1957.  Come to think of it, would Alfred Hitchcock have cast Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) if he hadn’t seen him portray Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out ?  I think not!

I don’t recall Piersall doing anything memorable that night in D.C., but the following summer, while watching the Phillies’ telecast of a game against the Mets at the Polo Grounds, I saw him run around the bases backwards after hitting his 100 ^th career home run, the only time he went deep for the Mets and the only home run he hit in the NL.  After 40 games with the Mets he was sent back to the American League where he remained for the rest of his career.  Guess he was just too mysterious for the NL.

At any rate, D.C. Stadium was only the second MLB park I’d been to, so I didn’t have much basis for comparison.  It was certainly a stark contrast from raunchy old Connie Mack Stadium.  Little did I know that D.C. Stadium was the advance guard of the multi-purpose concrete doughnut stadiums.  It almost looked as though a flying saucer had set down on East Capitol Street.  Had Klaatu returned to D.C. to make the earth stand still once again?

Two of the stadium’s features struck me as particularly odd.  First, the roof of the stadium wasn’t flat.  It was like a wrap-around sine wave, a Mobius strip in training.  Second, in the outfield there was an upper deck but not a lower deck.  Now that was something you’d never see in the National League.  You might see a lower deck plus an upper deck, or just a lower deck, but you would never see just an upper deck.  A fan’s chances of going home with a souvenir home run ball were close to nil, at least until Frank Howard joined the team in 1965.

On the field, the ball game between the Senators and the Orioles (looking back, I realize this was the first time I saw Brooks Robinson in person) sure looked like the games I had seen at Connie Mack.  Yet I was trying to wrap my head around the fact that these Washington Senators (the junior senators?) were in just their second year of existence, and most of those old Washington Senators (the senior senators?) I had on baseball cards through 1960 were now playing in some place called Bloomington, Minnesota.  Talk about mysterious!  If the American League was the “other” league in a parallel universe, was it possible there were parallel teams within that league?

If a D.C. baseball fan had fallen into a coma during Memorial Day weekend of the 1960 season and awakened one year later, he would have discovered that the New Senators were playing the Old Senators at Griffith Stadium, the Old Senators park!  How to account for that?  Did the Senators have some sort of evil twin franchise?  Wait a minute…what was the nickname of that Old Senators franchise that moved to Minnesota?  Cue the Twilight Zone theme!

By the time I attained the age of majority, I had made multiple visits to American League ballparks in Baltimore and Chicago, and I had seen numerous Oriole and White Sox telecasts.  The mysterious aura surrounding the AL had largely faded away.  I began to suspect that there were two leagues, separate but equal – no matter what the Supreme Court said in Brown v. Board of Education .  Then the Washington Senators left town again !  And again they moved to another place I’d never heard of – Arlington, Texas.

Well, given the fact that the Senators played in the nation’s capital smack dab in the middle of the US intelligence community, I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell was going on.  Had the two Senators franchises been so hopelessly compromised that they had to be sent packing to flyover country because they were threats to national security?  Compromised senators are certainly nothing new in D.C. – but an entire team of Senators?  Twice?

In 1960 Camilo Pascual and Pedro Ramos were on the Senators’ pitching staff.  Both were natives of Cuba back when Fidel Castro was cozying up to the Soviet Union.  The Senators also had Harmon Killebrew, popularly known as the Killer.  Did this nickname derive from his surname and his penchant for hitting tape measure home runs?  Or was he moonlighting as a CIA hit man?  Was the whole franchise shift engineered to exile those three guys (and who knows how many others on the team)?

So what was the story in 1971?  Given manager Ted Williams’ military record, he was surely above suspicion.  But Denny McLain?  Curt Flood?  Those guys were more than a tad subversive, wouldn’t you say?

Meanwhile the whole Kansas City situation stumped me – no, not the Philadelphia A’s transfer.  Owner Charlie Finley, who moved in mysterious ways ( e.g ., orange baseballs, a mule mascot, sheep grazing on the right field berm), moved the A’s to an unlikely destination: Oakland, California.  Right in the Giants’ back yard!  Did he think that a metro area of 2,464,000 could support two teams?  Charlie Finley was perhaps the ultimate mystery man.  On the other hand, he was for more entertaining than the corporate types who run baseball teams today.

After the move, an expansion team was placed in Kansas City in 1969.  That in itself didn’t bother me but the team nickname, the Royals, did.  The US constitution bars all titles – royalty is expressly forbidden in America.  Did George Washington and his troops shiver through that Valley Forge winter in 1778 just so their descendants could name a baseball franchise after those slimy Limey royals?

Also in 1969, the other expansion franchise, the Seattle Pilots didn’t last more than one year before moving to Milwaukee!  Something fishy about that, and I don’t mean Puget Sound.  Personally, I think Jim Bouton jinxed the franchise.  Talk about subversion in baseball – he literally wrote the book on it!  And perhaps most suspicious of all…who bought the Seattle franchise?  Bud Selig – a car salesman !  Now there’s a profession that screams integrity!  How could American League owners approve such a move?  Perhaps Bud made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.  Given the size of his fleet, he could easily take them for a ride.

And then in 1973 the AL introduced that damnable designated hitter rule!  I could overlook the fact that the AL and NL had different Presidents, that AL and NL umpires used different types of chest protectors, and that MLB used baseballs stamped “Official American League” or “Official National League.”  Those were merely cosmetic.  They had nothing to do with the game itself.  But the DH rule knocked everything off kilter.

If one league could make such a rule as that, then the two leagues were no longer parallel.  The DH rule was not a mere game-changer but a league -changer.  If the law of gravity applies in one universe but not in another, then the two universes are not parallel!  Call it The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (the name of a book published in 1971…like Casey said, you could look it up).

Of course, it all came crashing down in 2022 when the NL adopted the DH and the two leagues were once again in parallel alignment.  With interleague play and countless national telecasts, the line between the two leagues has been blurred.  But for how long?  The American League has a history of unexpectedly veering off in a different direction.

Predicting the unpredictable is an oxymoron, and I can’t begin to speculate on what the American League will do next to shake things up, but the prospect of a team in Las Vegas opens up all sorts of possibilities.  How does a franchise that started in the Quaker City (with no Sunday baseball) end up in Sin City (24-hour boozing and gambling)?  Now there’s a mystery in search of a solution.  Good luck with that, given the motto “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”  But that’s OK.  After decades of watching the American League go about its business, I’ve come to realize that, unlike mystery novels, real-life mysteries are rarely solved.  One just learns to live with them.