Veteran Pitching

Patriots Day in Boston, April 19, 1948.  The Philadelphia Athletics are in town to play an opening day doubleheader against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park.  

Connie Mack, the 85 year old Athletics team owner and manager, would start two veteran pitchers that day.  And by veterans, I mean World War Two veterans, Phil Marchildon and Lou Brissie.  The unusual part was not that the two were veterans, after all, of the 21 players on both teams who started at least one of the games that day, 19 had been in military service during the war.  What was different about for these pitchers was their wartime experience, Marchildon surviving being shot down on a bombing raid and eight months as a German prisoner of war, while Brissie had been so badly wounded in Italy, no one thought he'd pitch again.

(Lou Brissie)(Phil Marchildon)

Phil Marchildon was Canadian, born in rural Ontario in 1913.  Phil got a late start, not  playing baseball until he was 18 or 19, but showed enough promise to be signed by the Athletics in 1940, becoming a starter for the downtrodden A's in 1941 and 1942, going 10-15 and 17-14, in the latter season being the top pitcher for a team which went 55-99.

After the '42 season, Phil joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, becoming a tail gunner on a Halifax bomber.  On his 26th mission on August 17, 1944 Marchidon, along with a buddy, bailed out of his damaged bomber, plunged into the North Sea, and after being rescued by Danish fishermen, was captured by the Germans.  Phil and his crewmate were the only survivors.

He was sent to Stalag Luft III, where the events depicted in the movie The Great Escape, took place, and was there until the end of the war.  Marchildon lost 40 pounds as a POW, and witnessed some of his fellow prisoners executed for petty infractions.

Phil returned to Canada very depressed and showing symptoms of what we now call PTSD.  He rejoined the A's but according to his SABR biography:

"A fairly open, friendly enough person before the war, Marchildon came back a different, guarded man. As teammate George Kell said, 'Phil really changed after his war experiences; he was very serious and rarely spoke about what he had gone through.'

Returning as a full time starter in 1946, Marchildon went 13-16 and then had an outstanding '47 season, going 19-9 and finishing 9th in the MVP balloting.

On April 19, the A's hurler started out easily setting down the first three Red Sox hitters, Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky and Ted Williams, but seemed to briefly lose it in the bottom of the 2nd when Stan Spence, Vern Stephens, and Bobby Doerr hit back to back to back solo home runs. 

The A's scored one in the 5th and two in the 8th to tie the game, which went into extra innings.  In the top of the 11th, the A's added two more runs and while the Sox scored an unearned run in the bottom of the frame, Phil Marchidon came away with a 5-4 victory.  Over the last nine innings, Phil gave up only 4 hits and no earned runs.

Unlike Marchildon, Lou Brissie had no pre-war major league experience.  A South Carolina boy, born in 1924, Lou signed with the A's right out of high school in 1941.  The plan was for him to attend college and then join the club.  The world had other plans for Lou.

Brissie enlisted in 1942 and ended up in the 88th Infantry Division which saw a year of combat in Italy during 1944 and 1945.  It was hard fighting.  A WW2 US infantry division had about 15,000 soldiers and during its time in Italy, the 88th suffered 12,464 dead, wounding, and missing (excluding captured).  Lou, by then a squad leader, was one of the casualties.

In the Apennine Mountains, near Florence, on December 7, 1944 Lou's unit came under heavy German artillery fire, which killed eight enlisted men and killed or wounded three of the company's officers. The shell that got Lou broke both his feet, shattered his left tibia and shinbone, inflicting shrapnel wounds to his right shoulder, both hands and both thighs.  Knocked unconscious he was found several hours later and taken to a hospital where he successfully pleaded with the surgeons not to amputate his leg.

Lou wrote Connie Mack from the hospital and according to Brissie:

"He told me that my duty now was to try to get well, and whenever I felt I was ready to play, he would see I got the opportunity. That meant an awful lot to me. It was a tremendous motivator.”  

After two years, 23 operations, and with a metal plate in his left leg, Lou was to get his opportunity.  In 1947, pitching for the A's Savannah Indians farm team, Brissie went 23-5 and made his major league debut in late September against the Yankees who hammered him.  His second start was against the Red Sox on April 19, 1948.

Brissie retired the first 6 Red Sox batters before a double and single scored a run in the 3rd, knotting the game at 1-1.  The A's added three runs in the 4th on two hits, including a Brissie single, a walk, and an error, to take a 4-1 lead into the 6th.

In the 6th, after a Dom DiMaggio double, Ted Williams hit a line drive that ricocheted off Brissie's metal leg with DiMaggio scoring.  Williams stopped at first, called time, and went to the mound to check on the prone Brissie.  According to Brissie:

"When Ted leaned down, I said, ‘Damn it, Ted! Why don’t you pull the ball?’” 

The score would remain 4-2, with Brissie tossing a 4-hitter and striking out seven.  He'd go on to compile a 14-10 record and finish 4th in Rookie of the Year voting.

Marchildon and Brissie went on different paths after that day.  For Phil, the opening day victory was the highlight of the season as he finished 9-15 with a sore arm.  He would only pitch 17 more innings in 1949 and 1950 before his baseball career ended.  Marchildon continued to have adjustment problems, sitting around the house and drinking beer according to his SABR bio.  With the help of his wife and friends he eventually pulled himself out of the depths, passing in 1997 at the age of 83.

In 1949, Lou Brissie went 16-11 and pitched in the All-Star game.  His major league career ended in 1953.  After retiring he became Commissioner of the American Legion Junior Baseball Program, and then worked as a scout for the Dodgers and Braves.  Later he served on the South Carolina State Board of Technical Education.  Throughout the years his damaged leg required treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals every four to six weeks.  Lou Brissie died in 2013 at the age of 89.

My thanks to the Society for American Baseball Research biography project which made this piece possible.  I came across a reference to Phil Marchildon, looked up his biography, and while doing further research realized he and Brissie pitched on the same day.

The Road Back

(The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Grant Wood, 1931)

Today is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride to warn of the British army advance into the countryside around Boston.  He set out late on the evening of April 18 to warn the countryside, was captured by the British, and released in time to appear on the Lexington Green the following morning. This is a repost from several years ago:

 

"During the whole affair, the rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with perseverance and resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into any regular body.  Indeed they knew too well what was proper, to do so.  Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself very much mistaken.

"For my part, I never believed, I confess, that they would have attacked the king's troops, or have had the perseverance I found in them yesterday."

- Lord Percy, April 20, 1775

The quote is from Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer, which I recently reread, and Lord Percy is referring to the final part of the British retreat from Lexington to Charlestown, along what is now known as Battle Road, on April 19, 1775.  Percy led a relief column out of Boston that morning to support the British force sent late the prior evening to seize Patriot arms stored in Concord.

When Lord Percy arrived in Lexington at mid-day he found a panicked British force hastening back from Concord in disarray, stunned by the resistance and the number of casualties inflicted upon them by the locals, whom, until that day, they held in contempt.  If Percy had not shown up it is doubtful any of the original British force would have made it back to Boston.  Under the direction of Lord Perc,y the combined force fought its way back with the most violent action of the day taking place in Menotomy (now Arlington).

Lord Percy's observation was perceptive.  For the most part he was not encountering local farmers spontaneously taking positions behind walls to shot at his soldiers.  These were regiments organized by local Massachusetts towns and under the direction of William Heath, a Roxbury farmer who had taught himself the rudiments of military strategy, and thought deeply in advance how to deal with British regulars.  The local regiments did not fight the British from fixed positions but rather formed a moving circle of skirmishers around the entire enemy column during this last phase of the British retreat.

Learning about the little-known Heath and the patriot military strategy is one of the joys of reading Fischer's book.  While it reclaims the legacy of Paul Revere it also tells the entire story of April 19 in great, and very readable detail.  Revere was much more than the man who made his famous ride.  He was instrumental in the years leading up to the events of April 19, becoming the key link between the artisans and tradesmen of Boston and the elite businessmen and lawyers like John Hancock, Joseph Warren, and Sam Adams.  He is seemingly everywhere, involved in every key event.

On the night of April 18-19 Revere was captured by the British on the road between Lexington and Concord.  Released later that evening he made his way to Lexington, where he had previously stopped to warn Hancock and Adams, who were staying at a house next to the Town Green, of the British expedition.  On his return he helped relocate the two patriot leaders to a more remote location and then learned they had left a large chest full of sensitive documents at a tavern on the Green!  Recruiting an assistant they removed the chest and carted it across the Green as dawn broke passing through the Lexington militiamen assembling there and seeing the approaching British troops.  As Revere reached the nearby woods he heard the first shots of the American Revolution.

Fischer is one of our great narrative historians and while Paul Revere's Ride is scholarly and full of fascinating footnotes at the end, it is also a rollicking and exciting tale as told by the author.  Washington's Crossing, about the darkest days of the Revolution in late 1776, is another narrative masterpiece by Fischer.  

In his introduction, Fischer explains his continued belief in the power of the narrative even as other approaches have come to dominate historical scholarship:

Pathbreaking scholarship in the 20th century has dealt mainly with social structures, intellectual systems, and material processes.  Much has been gained by this enlargement of the historian's task, but something important has been lost.  An entire generation of academic historiography has tended to lose sense of the causal power of particular actions and contingent events.  

An important key here is the idea of contingency - not in the sense of chance, but rather of 'something that may or may not happen' . . . An organizing assumption of this work is that contingency is central to any historical process, and vital to the success of our narrative strategies about the past.

To that end, this inquiry studies the coming of the American Revolution as a series of contingent happenings, shaped by the choices of individual actors with the context of large cultural processes.

Fischer's first book, originally his doctoral thesis, is Albion's Seed, the most important book ever written about the cultural differences between the British groups that settled America and their impact on the strands of American culture that powered this country throughout its history, at least until recent decades.

While modern academic theory has reduced all those of European origin into a faceless, indistinguishable blob of white supremacy, Albion's Seed reminds us of the strikingly different cultures from different geographical areas within England that settled in various parts of the New World - Puritans in New England, Quakers in the mid-Atlantic, Cavaliers in the South and the Scots-Irish in the backcountry.  Cultural and religious traditions in these groups varied tremendously and those differences carried over into America.

In the introduction to Paul Revere's Ride, Fischer speaks to the cultural traditions he identified in Albion's Seed writing:

Paul Revere's idea of liberty was not the same as our modern conception of individual autonomy and personal entitlement.  It was not a form of "classical Republicanism", or "English Opposition Ideology", or "Lockean Liberalism", or any of the learned anachronisms that scholars have invented to explain a way of thought that is alien to their own world.

He believed deeply in New England's inherited tradition of ordered freedom, which gave heavy weight to collective rights and individual responsibilities - more so than is given by our modern calculus of individual rights and collective responsibilities.

His genius was to promote collective action in the cause of freedom - a paradox that lies closer to the heart of the American experience than the legendary historical loners we love to celebrate.

And then there is Samuel Whittemore.  Read Tough Guy.

A Memory

Over the years it became overshadowed by the later inning drama of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds; Bernie Carbo's pinch hit 3-run homer with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the 8th, Denny Doyle getting thrown out at the plate in the bottom of the 9th, Dwight Evans' miraculous snag of Joe Morgan's line drive in the 11th, and Carlton Fisk's dramatic walk off home run in the 12th, but I still vividly remember the incident depicted above, which occurred in the 5th inning, and the image of a crumpled Fred Lynn so still at the base of the Fenway Park centerfield wall.

The Big Red Machine was ahead 3-2, entering Game 6, and looking to wind things up.  Sox starting pitcher Luis Tiant got through the first 4 innings before running out of gas.  At that point, the Sox were up 3-0 on a three-run home run by rookie sensation Lynn.

In the top of the 5th, Tiant got Caesar Geronimo to fly out but then walked Ed Armbrister and gave up a single to Pete Rose, leaving runners on 1st and 3rd.  Next up was Ken Griffey Sr and he slammed a hanging breaking pitch deep to center.  Lynn racing after it crashed into the concrete wall (padding was added later) and slumped awkwardly and immobile at the base of the wall.  Griffey ended up on third and two runs scored.  Meanwhile, the crowd was completely silent as Lynn stayed motionless.  It was also silent in the living room in which I watched in Maynard, Massachusetts.  Everyone was wondering if he had broken his neck or back.

As Lynn explained years later in this video, he turned just as he hit the wall so that his back, not head, took the impact.  He was fully conscious when he was on the ground, but initially he could not feel anything below his waist and thought the best course of action was not to move.  Fortunately, he got the feeling back and was able to continue in the game, but I will never forget that moment.

Fred Lynn has a very positive, upbeat twitter account, and often visits Fenway.  Take a look.

Return Of The Magic Bus

 

Back in 2017, THC did a post on the memorable trip he took with the future Mrs THC on the Magic Bus in September 1978, traveling from Athens to Paris.  The post has drawn more comments than anything else on Things Have Changed.  As wild as our adventure was, many of the comments have matched or exceeded our experience for sheer weirdness.  The Magic Bus remains prominent in the memories of many of its passengers forty and more years later.

 Last month THC was contacted by Spiros Vasiliou, a writer for the popular Greek online newspaper, Reader.gr, who was working on an article on the Magic Bus and had come across my 2017 post, which I gave him permission to use.  I learned that the Magic Bus, which began as a transport on the Hippie Trail in the early 70s, going all the way to Nepal originally, also had a place in Greek culture and memory.

You can find the lengthy article here, including photos and excerpts from my post, but you'll have to do the translating yourself! 

Spiros also told me that the Magic Bus inspired a very popular rock song in the 1980s by one of the pioneering Greek new wave bands (it's got 2.4 million views on YouTube).  The band was Tripes and the closest translation of the song title is Psyche Taxicab.

These are the translated lyrics:

London, Amsterdam, or Berlin

You've forgotten exactly where you want to go

No matter how much I borrow, I won't let you

Go for rides on the Magic Bus anymore

 

Traveling soul 

And if I want to be by your side, it's hard to stay

It's time to see my own life

On this trip I won't wait for you

 

I'll go shopping and one night

What I have inside of me for you I'll erase

The road you've taken is a one-way street

And I don't see you turning back 

Take a listen.  It's pretty good.

 

 

Translation of the section on our trip:

American Mark Stoller is one of the thousands of passengers who traveled to Greece in the late 1970s on the Magic Bus. Several years ago, he decided to record that experience on his blog. What followed was something he never imagined. Dozens of responses to his text, from people who had similar experiences! “I am still amazed that my post on the Magic Bus has received more comments than anything else I have written on my blog since I started it in 2012,” he tells us. “So many years later, my wife and I still have such enjoyable memories of our month in Greece and the Magic Bus,” he adds, and kindly provides us with the itinerary of the trip, as it was distributed to passengers in the summer of 1978!

The article then goes on to include a long quote from my 2017 post.