The Whiz Kids: The Story of the fightin’ Phillies

By Harry T Paxton

Vintage major league baseball book tells the story of the 1950 Philadelphia Phillies National League Champion baseball club, as reported by a Philadelphia sportswriter who covered the team.

The team had a number of young players: the average age of a member of the Whiz Kids was 26.4 The team won the 1950 National League pennant but failed to win the World Series.



After owner R. R. M. Carpenter, Jr. built a team of bonus babies, the 1950 team won for the majority of the season, but slumped late, allowing the defending National League champion Brooklyn Dodgers to gain ground in the last two weeks. The final series of the season was against Brooklyn, and the final game pitted the Opening Day starting pitchers, right-handers Robin Roberts and Don Newcombe, against one another. The Phillies defeated the Dodgers in extra innings in the final game of the season on a three-run home run by Dick Sisler in the top of the tenth inning. In the World Series which followed, the Whiz Kids were swept by the New York Yankees, who won their second of five consecutive World Series championships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839747052

Book preview

cover.jpgimg1.png

© Barakaldo Books 2020, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE WHIZ KIDS

THE STORY OF THE FIGHTIN’ PHILLIES

BY

HARRY R. PAXTON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

CHAPTER I—Introduction 6

CHAPTER II—Building the New Phillies 9

CHAPTER III—Bob Carpenter 16

CHAPTER IV—Eddie Sawyer and His Staff 22

CHAPTER V—Robin Roberts and Curt Simmons 28

CHAPTER VI—Granny Hamner, Willie Jones, and Richie Ashburn 34

CHAPTER VII—Jim Konstanty 41

CHAPTER VIII—Del Ennis and Andy Seminick 46

CHAPTER IX—Bob Miller, Bubba Church, Ken Johnson, Ken Heintzelman, and The Bullpen 60

CHAPTER X—Via Chicago—Eddie Waitkus, Russ Meyer, and Bill Nicholson 66

CHAPTER XI—Dick Sisler, Mike Goliat, and The Bench 71

CHAPTER XII—The Pennant Race 76

CHAPTER XIII—The 1950 World Series 82

First Game 84

Second Game 85

Third Game 86

Fourth Game 88

Appendix 89

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 95

DEDICATION

To the ladies: Olwyn, Elsa,

Vicky and Jean

CHAPTER I—Introduction

There have been a lot of good teams over the years in baseball, and usually one is much the same as another. They take their turns in the spotlight and then fade back into the record books, to become just names in the long roll of pennant winners. Occasionally, however, there is a team so distinctive that it catches the imagination of the country and develops into an enduring legend. Sometimes it is because a team is so fabulously strong, like the New York Yankees of Joe McCarthy, with their seven pennants in eight years. Sometimes it is because a team is so colorful, like Frank Frisch’s Gas House Gang of St. Louis Cardinals, who took only a single championship, but were a remarkable collection of vivid personalities.

Another unforgettable team may now be in the making in Philadelphia, where the Phillies have just entered into what—barring wholesale war mobilization—should be a lengthy period as a winning ball club. Like the legendary outfits of the past, the Phillies have a special flavor all their own. It is an attractive blend. During the 1950 season just past, millions of people across the nation were pulling for the Phils.

The appeal of the Phillies begins with their youth. From Club Owner Bob Carpenter on down, this is a young man’s outfit. Among the key players, only Jim Konstanty, the demon relief pitcher, was over thirty when the season started. A majority are in their early twenties. Most young men are just getting started in some occupation at that age; these kids are competing at the top of a highly precarious business. Yet they perform with surprising skill and confidence. No team of established stars ever overawes the Phillies. They obviously intend to win every time they step on the field, and most of the time they do just that.

Then there is their remarkable spirit. They go all out on every play—grabbing that extra base or making that diving catch that may decide the ball game. Sometimes they are quite literally the Fighting Phillies, slugging it out with their fists if the opposition wants to play that way. There is unusual esprit de corps. Baseball is essentially a game of individual effort—it’s nice if your team wins, but a fellow’s own job and pay check depend on whether he gets his base hits and makes his fielding plays. On this team, though, the men on the bench get into the games as wholeheartedly as the men in the line-up. Players spontaneously pour out of the dugout to congratulate a man who has hit an important home run, and swarm around a pitcher as he comes off the mound after a hard-won game.

The emergence of this team into the limelight has been all the more dramatic because of the background from which it sprang. The Phillies have been the most consistently bad team of modern times. The term Philly ballplayer has been a byword for an athlete who didn’t have the real big-time stuff. Now, almost overnight, all this has changed. It took a lot of doing. In fact—as will shortly be related—baseball has never seen anything quite like the rebuilding program that brought about the Philly revival.

In their combative, knock-’em-over style of play, the Phillies are something of a throwback to the rough, tough professional ballplayers of the old school. Off the field, however, they typify the newer breed of careerman athlete that predominates in the game today. For the most part, they have come into the business with their eyes open, after weighing all the angles, like ambitious lads planning a future in any other field.

They are aware of all the hard facts—that there are only 400 playing jobs in the major leagues, and that a ballplayer has at best a limited span of years. Most of them already have family responsibilities, having married young. As a common-sense matter of self-preservation, they avoid excessive drinking and partying. Some of the young Phillies don’t drink at all. Some of them don’t smoke, for that matter, or even indulge in hells and damns. At a boarding-house the parents of Richie Ashburn maintained for half a dozen of the youngest players in 1948 and 1949, the boys consumed about half a case of beer a summer among them. At the same time they were putting away ten to twelve quarts of milk a day.

By and large, the Phillies come under the clean-cut, wholesome heading. But this can convey an unrealistic impression. These are aggressive, self-assertive young men. If they seem like a bunch of college boys—which many of them have been—they are the robust type who dominate life at the frat houses, rather than the earnest intellectuals who inhabit the library stacks.

There is a lot of heavy kidding. They ride one another about playing-field slips. The unforgivable sin is for a ballplayer to pat himself on the back. He must never say, if he has a big day against some pitcher, I murdered that bum. The most he may say is, I had pretty good luck with him.

There is no deferential treatment for anyone on this ball club, however imposing his salary or batting average. Even President Bob Carpenter has been known to have a piece of ice slipped into his hip pocket when he happened to be in the dressing room while the boys were clowning around. There is seldom any physical roughhousing, though; the team can’t risk an accidental injury that might put a man out of action.

Much of the conversational byplay centers around baseball, which is one tipoff on why the Phillies are such a fast-rising outfit. The game is more than just the way they make their living. They love to play ball, and have a tremendous urge to excel at it, both individually and as a group. Manager Eddie Sawyer and his coaches are good teachers, but when you compliment any of them on the progress they have made with various players, they will tell you it goes back to the fact that the boys had the ability and desire to learn.

Catcher Andy Seminick, who comes as close as any man around to being a self-made ballplayer, has put in hundreds of practice hours overcoming a weakness on pop fouls. Willie Jones has drilled with similar intensity to develop his ability to smother almost everything hit in the vicinity of third base. Curt Simmons has toiled by the hour to acquire the extra three inches of control he needed to become an effective big-league pitcher.

At the Clearwater training camp in 1950, the Phillies’ radio announcer Gene Kelly watched Dick Sisler, who had broken into the line-up at first base in 1949 when Eddie Waitkus was shot, sweating away to win himself a new job in the outfield. You sure want to play, don’t you, Dick? observed Kelly.

Gene, said Sisler, I want to play so bad I’d catch if they’d let me.

Eddie Waitkus himself once was discussing his high-school days. You were the best player on the team, weren’t you? he was asked.

No, he said, I was just one of the good players. But I decided very early that I was going to make baseball my career. I concentrated on it. There are a lot of boys in this country with baseball ability. Most of them just don’t want to be ballplayers enough to work at it.

The Phillies’ pennant fight in 1950 was very much a combined operation. The Phils are not a one-man team. Nor are they an overpowering team. They had one of the higher team batting averages in the National League in 1950—although nothing like those of the leaders in the American League—but they were well behind such clubs as the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves in runs scored and home runs. They seldom have a runaway game. Phillies’ scores usually are in the neighborhood of 5-to-3, or 4-to-1, or 3-to-2. Yet they have a habit of getting hits when they need them. And almost every man in the line-up is a definite threat to knock the ball out of the park.

However, the Phillies’ greatest strength is their ability to keep the other fellows from scoring runs. Until attrition set in in the last month of the 1950 season, they had an uncommonly large array of talented starting pitchers, backed by swift, wide-ranging fielders. It is harder to drive a ground ball through the Phillies’ infield than through almost any other in baseball today. Perhaps the best way to sum up the Philadelphia defense is to state these facts: in nearly two-thirds of their games during 1950—a total of ninety-nine—the opposition was held to four runs or less. In nearly half their games—a total of seventy-six—the opposition got no more than three. But whether a game was a pitching duel or a slugfest, the Phillies usually managed to get at least one more run than the other team.

The Phillies all have this much in common: they are boys who made good. Beyond that, no two are alike. Each of the principal characters in the Philadelphia baseball story is a distinctive personality. Each is a story in himself. These stories will all be told in the pages that follow.

The new Phillies are a compound of youth and zest and David-and-Goliath and rags-to-riches. No perfect tag line for them has yet been developed. So far, the nickname that best captures the flavor of the Phillies is the Whiz Kids—even though it suffers the defect of having originated with a teenage basketball team at the University of Illinois during World War II. No matter what you call them, the Phillies are quite a tale.

CHAPTER II—Building the New Phillies

A couple of years ago visitors to the Florida baseball camps began to notice one curious change. The ballplayers with the Philadelphia Phillies no longer wanted to escape. For a generation and more, the Phillies had been baseball’s dead-end street, where an ambitious kid could only