A Hall of Famer who was traded for a bus
Charley Pride's pursuit of a spot on an MLB roster took him from the Mississippi Delta to Montana, California, Florida and eventually to Nashville and country music stardom.
Also this edition:
Doug Jones was one of baseball’s ultimate late bloomers
Why did the Yankees lose faith in Clint Frazier and Luke Voit?
Baseball figured into the bidding war for Charley Trippi
Trivia time
HEART OF THE ORDER
Whenever I hear some odd or intriguing yarn -- or maybe just the germ of an odd or intriguing yarn -- I tell people: “There’s a great country-western song in there somewhere.”
Charley Pride, a musical star and former professional baseball player who passed away a little more than a year ago (Dec. 12, 2020) at age 86, sang great country songs. But he didn’t write many.
Which is too bad. Because I’ll bet he had a lot of the kind of stories that work well in country songs.
From his baseball career alone he certainly could have recorded “You Traded me — for a Bus,” “Palm Springs was the Last Resort (for my Career),” “Montana Smelter Blues,” and “I Got Invited to Spring Training All the Time (After I Quit Playing)”
Pride grew up picking cotton in Mississippi. Jackie Robinson inspired Pride to play professional baseball. And later Pride broke barriers himself.
Pride hurt his pitching arm as a 19-year-old playing in the low minors for the New Yankees organization, but he chased the dream of playing major league baseball another decade. And it was baseball that led to his first paying gig as a singer, playing before opening pitch at semipro games.
Later the Mets gave him a bus ticket — just to get him out of their hair — to Nashville, where he wound up getting into the music business in a big way.
Details are hazy
Most of the details about Pride’s baseball career are a little hazy. We don’t have good records from the Negro Leagues and low minors from the 1950s.
Many of the obituaries and tributes that followed his death said the singer was a Negro League player who became a minor-leaguer. His career actually began in the Iowa State League (which doesn’t show up on baseball-reference.com). Then he went back and forth between the minors and Negro League teams. His last minor league stop led to a job in a smelter and a spot on the company’s semipro team. Then he tried to catch on with a couple of MLB expansion teams.
His first professional experience was with Wall Lake, an all-black team in the Iowa State League. He then caught on with the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League in 1952. He impressed the Yankees enough for them to sign him. He had short stints in Boise in the Pioneer League and Fon du Lac in the Wisconsin State League in 1953.
In 1954, he played for the Louisville Clippers in Negro American League, but the club had a major hole to fill. Pride and another player were traded to the Birmingham Black Barons for a bus.
In 1955, he played for Nogales Yaquis of the Arizona-Mexico League.
In 1956 he was back with Memphis. After the season, Pride played on a team Negro American League stars who barnstormed with the Willie Mays All-Stars. He told an AP reporter in Houston in the 1970s that during a game in Albany, Ga., he struck out a dozen players on the Mays team, which included Mays, Hank Aaron, Elston Howard, and Frank Robinson.
He served in the Army for two years, during which he married and had a son. He returned to Memphis. In 1958, he was selected to play in the prestigious East-West All-Star game.
Pride is “rated one of the finest curveball artists in the league,” the Muskogee (Oklahoma) Daily Phoenix wrote in a preview of one of Memphis’ exhibition games.
Pride wanted a raise for 1959. The Red Sox couldn't or wouldn't meet his price. Pride sat out the season.
The Negro Leagues had been shrinking since the late 1940s as MLB teams integrated. The Memphis Red Sox went out of business after the 1959 season.
The dream dies hard
By now, Pride was in his mid-20s, though somewhere along the line he managed to take four years on his official age -- a tradition in minor-league baseball.
He saw an ad for "baseball players capable of playing A-ball" with the Missoula Timberjacks of the Pioneer League according to a profile Jason Ratliffe for MILB.com. Pride mortgaged his furniture and moved his wife and son from Memphis to Montana.
GM Nick Mariana was so impressed with Pride’s “gumption,” he gave him a shot. It didn’t last long. Pride had two outings on the mound and gave up six runs in six innings. Mariana released Pride but found him a job at a smelter in East Helena and a spot on the company‘s semi-pro team, the Smelterites.
That might seem like small potatoes, but the Smelterites were a big deal in their corner of the world.
The Montana State League was the top story every day in the sports section of the Helena Independent Record.
Just by being a prominent player on the team, Pride was something of a local celebrity. And he became more of one.
Pride had listened to Grand Ole Opry on the radio as a teenager and taught himself to play guitar. He would sing for fans between innings in East Helena.
The Smelterites began paying Pride to take requests and play before games.
It was kind of a magical season for the Smetlerties and Pride. The team won its final 17 regular-season games to finish first in the Montana State League.
They swept the rival Helena Cardinals in four games in the playoffs. Pride was hitting well over .400 late in the season. In the clinching playoff game, he went 3-for-3 with a triple and stole three bases.
Pride’s pregame performances led to club bookings a couple of nights a week in Helena. In 1962, country stars Red Sovine and Red Foley heard Pride in Helena. Sovine told Pride to look him up if he ever got serious about singing.
A star is born
Pride was still serious about baseball. He managed to get a tryout with the expansion Los Angeles Angels in Palm Springs in 1961. He lasted a couple of weeks and was cut. Pride found Gene Autry at the team hotel and begged the owner to allow Pride to stay, Jack Dickey wrote in Sports Illustrated in 2018.
The meeting between the two future Country Music Hall of Famers didn’t go Pride’s way.
He went back to play for the Smelterites. After the New York Mets lost 120 games in their first season, Pride thought they might give anyone a chance. He wrote and sent newspaper clippings of his success to General Manager George Weiss. Pride received no response.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. So Pride hatched up a plot. He would just act as if he belonged. He shipped some bats to Mets training camp in Clearwater, Florida, and showed up at the team hotel in the middle of the night. He managed to find out that Sammy Drake, whom he knew from the Negro Leagues, was registered there. Drake let him stay in his room.
Pride’s ruse didn’t work long enough to board the team bus the next morning, Dickey wrote. But fortune favors the bold.
Weiss told him the Mets would pay for a bus ticket anywhere he wanted to go. Pride said he wanted to go back to Montana with a stopover in Nashville, Dickey wrote.
In that stopover in Nashville, Pride made the connections that eventually would launch him as a country music icon.
Heard but not seen
Pride often maintained that he never had any adverse reactions from white audiences.
But the producers, labels, and promoters feared that country audiences would reject him for skin color. They were so worried that his first records were released with no photo of Pride.
When he finally got in front of audiences, he would make a joke about his “permanent suntan” to break any tension and then perform his songs.
When Charlie Pride’s songs began hitting the charts, he was going into uncharted territory.
Country music had never seen a black performer who was a successful singing headliner in the manner of Pride.
Deford Bailey was a popular harmonica player on the country charts.
In 1962, Ray Charles released “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music,” which was a top-selling album. But Charles was already an established R&B star.
Aaron Neville and Tina Turner had cross-over hits.
Darius Rucker was well-known as the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish before turning to country-western in his solo career.
Cowboy Troy, who helped launch the “hick-hop movement,” and Mickey Guyton have enjoyed some success.
But no black artist has succeeded in country music like Pride. Few white artists could equal his success.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, Pride had 29 songs that made it to No. 1 on the Billboard 100 for country music. Through May 2020, he ranked No. 5 on the list of career No 1 hits.
A spring training fixture
One of Pride’s fans was Milwaukee’s Brewers manager Dave Bristol, who invited the singer to spring training in 1971.
The Sporting News reported that the Brewers players and coaches were surprised that this Pride guy could go through all the drills, unlike most celebrity invitees. They were surprised to learn of his background
Pride moved to Dallas in 1972. The Texas Rangers, also new to the area, invited Pride to spring training with them. He became a fixture. Now that he was no longer chasing his dream as a major leaguer, he was invited to spring training every year.
One year, Pride managed to get a hit and a ground out while facing future Hall of Famer Jim Palmer.
Garth Brook managed to get two singles in three highly publicized spring-training stints. So Brooks eclipsed Pride there — but Pride still leads Brooks in No.1 country hits.
Pride eventually became a part-owner of the Rangers. After the Rangers relocated spring training operations to Arizona, he and his wife bought a second home in Surprise.
When the Rangers opened Globe Life Stadium in 2020, Pride sang the national anthem. Regrettably, the Stadium was empty.
He won the Country Music Association’s Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020 and gave his final performance on Nov. 11, singing “Kiss An Angel Good Mornin’” during the CMA Awards show.
He contracted COVID-19 — I am not sure when that happened — and died a month later.
BONUS FRAMES
Doug Jones remembered
Another country singer/ ballplayer, ‘The Sultan of Slow’ cleaned up his act and racked up more than 300 saves
I want to mention the passing of Doug Jones, another country singer who chased his baseball dreams longer than he should have — and had a late-starting but ultimately successful major league career.
Jones passed away in late November, apparently of complications from COVID-19.
Jones was born in Southern California, grew up in Indiana, and dreamed of becoming a race car driver. That is until he flipped a race car.
He decided baseball might be more to his liking. After a year at Butler University, he headed out to Central Arizona College, a junior college outside of Coolidge. He pitched a no-hitter against the junion college in Tucson, Pima Community College, the first no-hitter against that program.
He was a second-team junior college All-American and eligible for the MLB draft. That January (there were two drafts annually in those days), the Brewers took Jones in the third round. He signed.
To make ends meet during his minor league career, he tended bar and sang in a country-western band in the Tucson area.
Jones made the major leagues for a four-game stint, all in relief, with the Brewers in 1982 and was rocked. He spent the rest of that season and then the next season at Triple-A Vancouver. By this time he was used almost exclusively as a reliever.
He didn’t have a great breaking ball and his fastball only touched 86 mph. The knock against Jones was his stuff wouldn’t work at the big league level.
The Brewers let him go after the 1984 season. It looked like he might be done, leaving the game with a 10.13 ERA for hs MLB career.
He decided to clean up his act, quit drinking, and dedicate himself to living a Christian life.
The Indians picked him up. He made it back to the majors in 1986, getting in 11 games and pitching effectively.
In 1987, a few months shy of his 30th birthday, Jones found out on the day of the Indians’ final exhibition game that he made the team out of spring training. He got off to a bad start and wound up back in the minors.
He worked his way back to the big club in late June and managed to stay with Cleveland the rest of the season, finishing with a 6-5 record, eight saves, and a 3.15 ERA.
In 1988, his age 31 season, was his first full season at the MLB level. By July he was on All-Star and had broken the MLB record for converting the most consecutive save opportunities.
With his excellent control and ability to change speeds, Jones,, known as the “Sultan of Slow,” was getting batters out at the MLB level through the 2000 season. He finished with 303 career saves.
He was pitching coach in college and the minor leagues. And he coached his son’s high school team, Pusch Ridge, to two Arizona state championships.
He and his wife Caty owned a Christian music label, His Heart Music.
Doug Jones stats
Yankees studs who now look like duds
Things didn’t go as expected for Clint Frazier and Luke Voit
One was the winning piece in a trade in 2018. The other was the player the team just couldn’t give up —even for a coveted and much-needed left-handed starter — in 2019.
Baseball is a cruel game. and a player can go quickly from shiny and new to old and tarnished.
The Yankees once saw Luke Voit and Clint Frazier as high-value players.
Now the Yankees are reportedly are trying to move Voit, and they released Frazier at the end of last season.
Voit deal
Let’s start with Voit. In 2018, in his age 27 season, Voit had proven he could hit for average (.327 at Triple-A Memphis in 2017) and power (.525 at Memphis in 2017) in the minors but had impressive in two stints with the Cardinals.
Right before the trade deadline, the Cardinals sent Voit (and some credits under international bonus pool for pitchers Giovanny Gallegos and Chasen Shreve.
With Yankees that season, he hit 14 homers with a 333. batting average a .405 on-base percentage and a .689 slugging percentage.
In 2019, he played 118 games for the Yankees with a .263/.378./.464 slash line. He led the majors in homers (22) in the shortened 2020 season.
Voit started the 2021 season on the injury list (knee surgery)and finished the season on the injury list (knee inflammation). In between, he had a couple more stints on the injured list.
He appeared in only 68 games and his production at the plate was mediocre — 11 homers and a .239/.328/.437 slash line.
Voit has not been able to stay healthy in now in 3 1/2 seasons with the Yankees and he is going into his age 31 season — a point in a player’s career where even healthy players tend to get injured more frequently.
The Yankees acquired Anthony Rizzo from the Cubs for the stretch run. Rizzo — who split time at first with Voit when both were healthy enough to play (Rizzo missed time with COVID-19) — is a free agent, but it appears the Yankees want him.
There is an assumption on the part of Yankees fans and the Tri-state sports-media complex, that like Lola in the song, whatever the Yankees want, the Yankees get. Leaving aside that the Lola number is from the musical “Damned Yankees,” the Red Sox are also said to be interested in Rizzo.
In the telling from the New England sports media complex, Rizzo, who began his professional career with the Sox, has ties to the organization and may want to be reunited. We will see.
For a long time, it looked like the Yankees were the big winners in the trade with the Cardinals as neither of those relief pitchers did anything special for the Redbirds.
But Gallegos blossomed in 2021, getting 14 saves and playing a key role during the Cardinals’ late-season surge that took them to playoffs.
If the Yankees sign a top-tier first baseman in free agency, they likely will want to part ways with Voit. But his value on the trade market is another question.
Luke Voit stats
Frazier has left the building
As the trade deadline approached in 2019, the Yankees were in desperate need of starting pitching. The Yankees finished that season with the top-scoring offense in MLB. The Bombers were 15th in team ERA. But the Yankees' bullpen was ninth. The starters were bringing down the team.
The Yankees nearly made a deal for Robbie Ray of the Diamondbacks. Ray was going to be a free agent at the end of the season. He wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire. He had a 9-7 record with a 3.91 ERA at the time.
The Diamondbacks were going nowhere, and they dealt star pitcher Zack Grienke to Houston. Arizona wanted Frazier in any deal for Ray.
At the time, Frazier was in Triple-A. But he had hit .283/.330/.513 with 11 home runs for the Yankees that season. Despite having a crowded outfield, the Yankees did not want to part with Frazier.
So they passed on the deal.
Ray was less than impressive the rest of the way, finishing the season the 2019 season with a 12-9 record and a .434 ERA. But the Yankees were not trying to acquire him to win in the regular season. So-so starting pitching and all, they clinched the division title in mid-September.
Ray, who struck out 12.8 batters per nine innings that season, could provide a left-handed power arm that might have helped the Yankees in the postseason.
Would his presence have made a difference in the 2019 ALCS against Houston? We will never know.
What we do know is the Yankees outfield remained crowded, and Frazier’s performance at the plate peaked in the middle of 2019. He has been hampered by injuries and less impressive in limited action since, including compiling a .186/.317/.317 slash line in 218 plate appearances in 2021.
He began the 2021 season as the starting left fielder, but had various vision-related problems.
The condition was first called vertigo, but apparently that is not the case. Frazier suffered a concussion from running into an outfield wall in 2018, and some believe that contributed to his problems in 2021.
Frazier is heading into his age 27 season, and he signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal on Dec. 1 with the Cubs.
Clint Frazier stats
Charley Trippi turns 100
Charley Trippi, a former Chicago Cardinals star and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, turned 100 on Dec. 14,
Trippi was a promising baseball prospect and a successful college baseball coach. And baseball played an important role in his landing a record contract with the Cardinals.
Trippi was born and grew up in Pennsylvania. He was the quarterback of the Georgia team that won the 1943 Rose Bowl, beating UCLA 9-0. He missed the next two seasons while serving in the military.
Because he would have graduated in 1945, Trippi was eligible for the NFL draft and was taken by the Chicago Cardinals as the top overall pick. Trippi played the next two seasons at Georgia,
Following Georgia’s victory over North Carolina and Choo Choo Justice in the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1, 1947, Trippi became the nation’s biggest ongoing story in sports.
By this time, the NFL had competition from the All-American Football Conference. Trippi’s rights in AAFC were held by the New York Yanks, owned by Dan Topping, Larry McPhail, and Del Webb, That trio also owned a baseball team called the New York Yankees.
Topping offering $60,000 over four years to play football for four seasons and perhaps as much as $40,000 to sign with the baseball team.
The notoriously cheap Bidwill family was offering to match that and allow Trippi to play baseball anywhere he wanted.
Though he was considered a good prospect, Trippi was not considered ready for MLB. Still, there was a reported $30,000 offer from the Red Sox. The Cubs and the minor-league Birmingham Barons and Atlanta Crackers were also interested.
Trippi got Charles Bidwill to up his offer to $100,000 over four years. And Trippi was still eligible to play baseball.
He played only one season of professional baseball, spending the summer of 1947 with Atlanta in the Double-A Southern Association. He hit .334 with three homers. He slugged .451 with an on-base percentage of ..414 and .865 OPS.
He wasn’t completely done with baseball, though. He coached the University of Georgia the next two seasons, going 34-18, a .654 winning percentage.
Trippi helped the Cardinals to the 1947 NFL championship.
Now he’s lived to be 100, and that hasn’t happened again. Perhaps another No.1 overall draft pick who was also a baseball prospect, Kyler Murray, will bring a title to the Cardinals.
Trivia Time
Who is the only man to play on a World Series-winning team and coach a team to an NFL championship?
Answer next edition
Last edition
What pitcher has the most career victories without ever winning the Cy Young Award? Hint: His first name starts with a D.
Denton True Young, better known as “Cy” (for Cyclone) won 511 games in his career, an MLB record. He retired after the 1911 season. He never won the award that carries his name.
Young died in 1955. Baseball started the award to honor the best pitcher in MLB in 1956. Beginning in 1967, the award was given to a pitcher in each major league.
I remember reading about Charley Pride being in spring training with the Brewers way back when and I thought it was pretty cool that the Crew gave him a chance to enjoy baseball after his playing days. What a great story. The other cool thing about this column is that Charley Trippi is 100 years old and I read somewhere else that he's still following the Cardinals closely. He has to be one of the oldest surviving players, and definitely the oldest surviving NFL champion. Doug Jones hit 90 on the speed gun at age 42, and he thought it was an accident.