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Overview
When discovered by Giants' manager John McGraw in 1925, Fitzsimmons became a household name to baseball fans around the country. A mainstay of the New York rotations of the 1920s and 1930s, Fitzsimmons pitched in the 1933 and 1936 World Series, where he suffered painful losses. Being traded to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1937 rejuvenated Fitzsimmons and brought him back to the World Series one last fateful time in 1941. When his playing days ended, Fitzsimmons managed the Philadelphia Phillies and later coached for the Giants and several other teams.
In Freddie Fitzsimmons: A Baseball Life, Peter J. De Kever brings to life Fitzsimmons's colorful character and most memorable games. Fitz's life in baseball spanned nearly half a century and brought him into contact with many of the game's luminaries, such as Babe Ruth, Bill Terry, Leo Durocher, and Willie Mays. A central player in the great 1941 pennant race, Fitzsimmons also witnessed Bobby Thomson's “shot heard 'round the world” a decade later. These and other stories figure prominently in this first biography of Freddie Fitzsimmons.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781491816035 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 3 MB |
Read an Excerpt
FREDDIE FITZSIMMONS
A Baseball Life
By PETER J. DE KEVER
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2013 Peter J. De KeverAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4918-1605-9
CHAPTER 1
FARM BOY
Baseball has no single birthplace. In its earliest forms, the game was played in pastures, village commons, military encampments, and vacant lots in growing towns. The national pastime Americans recognize today, though, was invented in New York City and Brooklyn during the 1840s and 1850s. There, the sport evolved rules that were standardized enough for competitive leagues to form, and baseball, entwined with American society, began to expand with its own Manifest Destiny.
Although modern professional baseball originated in the nation's largest cities, baseball players came from every corner of the country. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, images of skyscrapers and smokestacks excited the national spirit but were far from the world of most Americans, who still resided on farms or in small towns. They were the descendants of men and women who had tamed a continent or perhaps more recent immigrants pouring into the nation's seaports. Urbanization, though, was the inevitable trend for both the American people and baseball. Countless ballplayers who reached the professional ranks experienced this familiar pattern of leaving the land or a small town for the big city, replete with its opportunities and dangers.
Like so many major leaguers of baseball's Golden Age, Freddie Fitzsimmons was part of this migration. Descendants of patriots and pioneers, he and his family had deep roots in rural America.
The Fitzsimmons family traces its earliest American ancestors to eastern Virginia, near Richmond. The most prominent of these progenitors was Thomas Fitzsimmons, born in 1761 in Cumberland (later Powhatan) County. Fred's great-great-great grandfather, Thomas fought in the American Revolution, enlisting in Colonel Richard Parker's Virginia Regiment at age 15 with the rank of private. Fitzsimmons served in George Washington's army through most of his five years of service and was involved in some of the most prominent events of the war. During Thomas's first enlistment, he fought at White Plains, participated in Washington's Crossing of the Delaware, and fought in several other battles from January through June 1777. Fitzsimmons signed a three-year re-enlistment in the fall of 1777 and endured the terrible privations of Valley Forge the following winter. He was wounded at Monmouth in June 1778 and fought in the Carolinas before a third enlistment in February 1781. Now with Colonel Tucker's Virginia Regiment, Fitzsimmons saw action at Guilford Court House and was present at Yorktown when General Cornwallis was defeated, effectively ending the Revolution.
After the war, Thomas and his wife Polly began their family. Patrick Fitzsimmons, Fred's great-great grandfather, was born in Virginia in 1792, shortly before the family joined the thousands migrating across the mountains into the new state of Kentucky. Thomas settled his family in Shelby County, where he and Polly remained until the fall of 1836, when they moved to Hendricks County, Indiana, to be near some of their children. Thomas died in 1840 and is buried in New Winchester.
Family documents show that Patrick Fitzsimmons owned a 202-acre farm in Shelby County, Kentucky, in 1835.
His son Richard was born in 1822 and married Martha Miles, who was born in 1826. They left their native Shelby County in 1850 and migrated first to Marion County, Indiana. After a short time in the Indianapolis area, the Fitzsimmons family moved forty miles north to Prairie Township, in the northwest corner of Tipton County, south of Kokomo. Their growing family of ten children included Fred's grandfather, David Fitzsimmons, who was born in 1850.
Despite its proximity to Kokomo, today a city of 50,000 people, Prairie Township is still one of the most rural townships in Indiana, retaining much of the agricultural character that the first Fitzsimmons settlers would have known in the 1850s and that young Fred experienced in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Prairie Township was created in 1844 and during the 1850s experienced a large migration of residents, including the Fitzsimmons family. The population that decade grew from 722 to 1,247, and by the 1870s, 1,547 people resided in the township.
A history of Tipton County published in the late nineteenth century, describes the physical character of the land the Fitzsimmonses called home. G.N. Berry wrote, "Nature, in her green mantle, is nowhere more lovely than in that portion of Tipton County set aside by survey as Prairie Township. Cozy farmhouses nestle in somber quietude amid green orchards which dot the landscape in every direction." Like much of the Tipton Till Plain that runs through central Indiana, Prairie Township is generally flat, but some undulations add attractive variety to the landscape. Before the first white settlers came, thick forests covered Prairie Township, as they did much of Indiana, and through the second half of the 1800s, the native woods of walnut, beech, oak, and elm were steadily cleared in favor of croplands and pastures. The black loamy soil of the township favored the agrarian pursuits of its residents.
Growing up in Tipton County, David Fitzsimmons met Hannah Carter, who was also born in 1850, and the couple married on Christmas Day, 1870. Their son Richard, Fred's father, was born in 1873. David died six years later, and Hannah remarried.
Richard married Margaret Ellen Gordon on August 5, 1896, in Howard County. Ellen was three years younger than her husband. By 1900, Richard and Ellen were living on a 70-acre farm in parts of sections 32 and 33 of Prairie Township, half a mile south of the Howard-Tipton county line. They had one daughter, Mary Louise, who was born in 1898. The Fitzsimmons family owned their farm, which county land records indicate was comprised of two parcels: 30 acres at the southwest corner of the intersection of county roads 650N and 1000W and another 40 acres immediately across the road to the east.
Although every baseball reference work that lists player birthplaces says Frederick Landis Fitzsimmons was born in Mishawaka, that is not accurate. Fred most likely was born on the family farm in Prairie Township on July 28, 1901. No birth records for him exist in the Tipton County Health Department or in the Tipton newspaper, but family histories, his brother Dick, born in 1917 in Mishawaka, and his grandson Gregg Shelton, all affirm Fred's birthplace as being the family farm. County archivists today say it was common for rural births not to be registered, and the 18-mile distance from the Fitzsimmons farm to the county seat may also suggest why the addition to the family was not entered into the public record.
Howard and Marilyn Leisure today reside on the four-acre parcel that includes the oldest buildings in the immediate area. Howard Leisure asserts that his house dates back to the late nineteenth century and the nearby barn is perhaps fifty years older than that. Although documentation does not exist to confirm the Fitzsimmons family was living in this house in 1901, it is probable that they were. Thus, the white, two-story, wood-frame house at 6484 N. 1000 West is most likely Fred's birthplace.
Tipton County histories offer additional details of what Prairie Township was like when young Freddie was toddling about the landscape and creating his first memories. The township lacked a railroad, telegraph line, or even a post office, and its only village was tiny Groomsville, located three miles directly south of the Fitzsimmons farm. When Prairie Township residents needed to go into "town," they went a couple miles north instead, to Russiaville in Howard County.
Although the Prairie Township of Fred's earliest years lacked the modern conveniences found in towns like Kokomo and Tipton, the land was fertile, and farming there was reasonably successful. Evidence of prosperity can be seen in Gretchen Kemp's Tipton County and Her People, which describes the Prairie Township landscape surrounding the Fitzsimmons farm: "large barns ..., slatted corncribs, smoke houses, outside toilets, brooder and hen houses, spring houses, buggy sheds, well houses, and individual hog houses." Another county history refers to use of scientific farming methods and adequate drainage as attributes of the township's agriculture.
With the benefit of hindsight, one might interpret that in a few small ways young Fred was already developing a connection to the game of baseball that would later provide his livelihood for over forty years.
Most directly, Fred was named in honor of Richard's friend Frederick Landis, an attorney and the younger brother of future Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Of course, in 1901, no one could have known that either Fred Fitzsimmons or Kenesaw Mountain Landis would become prominently associated with major league baseball, but it is an interesting coincidence.
Frederick Landis was born in Seven Mile, Ohio, in 1872. About two years later, his family moved to Logansport, Indiana, 30 miles northwest of Tipton County. Landis earned a law degree from the University of Michigan in 1895 and began practicing law later that year in his adopted hometown. Exactly how Richard Fitzsimmons came to be friends with Fred Landis is lost to history. Landis was a prominent politician in the 1900s and 1910s, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from 19031907. After he was defeated for a third term, he returned to Logansport and stayed in the public eye as a speaker and writer. He was among the founders of the Progressive Party in 1912 and ran unsuccessfully on the party's gubernatorial ticket that year. Landis sought the Republican nomination for governor in 1928, but lost. He was elected to Congress in 1934 but died shortly after the election.
His brother, Kenesaw Mountain—named after the Civil War battle where his surgeon father lost a leg—was born in Millville, Ohio, in 1866. Growing up in Logansport, Kenesaw was a cyclist and baseball player. In 1891, he graduated from Union College School of Law in Chicago, where he continued his legal career, and President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the federal bench in 1905. Judge Landis became the Baseball Commissioner after the infamous Black Sox scandal of 1919 and remained in that office during Fitzsimmons's entire playing career in the major leagues.
Another connection between baseball and Fred's youth in Prairie Township comes from major league pitcher Charles "Babe" Adams, who was born in 1882 near Groomsville. Kemp writes that when Babe Adams was growing up in Prairie Township "he spent much time throwing clods at the birds and in the winter throwing snowballs."
In 1906, Adams made his major league debut with the St. Louis Cardinals and then spent the next 18 seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates. In the 1909 World Series against Detroit, he earned victories in all three games he pitched, including Game 7. Adams also pitched one inning of relief in Game 4 of the 1925 World Series in a losing effort against Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators. The Pirates won the Series, though, 4-3. Adams retired after the 1926 season with a career mark of 194-140.
After Adams had become famous in the World Series, perhaps Richard Fitzsimmons inspired young Fred's baseball career with tales of their hometown hero's achievements.
The tail-end of Adams's career with the Pirates in 1925-26 overlapped Fitzsimmons's first two seasons with the New York Giants. Collectively, Adams and Fitzsimmons would win 411 major league games and pitch in five different World Series—not bad for one sparsely populated rural Indiana township.
Dick FitzSimmons related that in the 1950s he visited the area in Prairie Township where his parents' farm was. One man who lived nearby recalled Fred playing catch with Richard, a timeless ritual repeated by fathers and sons everywhere in America. Knowing that Fred would one day be a major league pitcher, though, gives greater significance and foreshadowing to a father and son throwing the ball back and forth. With the farmhouse, a barn, and gently rolling acres of corn or pasture, those games of catch between little Fred and his father form an appealing tableau. After a hard day of labor on the farm, Richard must have savored each throw and catch with his son.
The farm where Fred spent his first few years is easily recognizable today. The 40-acre section east of County Road 1000 W has been subdivided into five lots, each with a modern house. The 30 acres across the road, though, probably looks much as it did in 1901. Corn grows in this field, and to the south a small woods forms part of the boundary with the neighboring farm. Otherwise, the landscape in all directions is comprised of open fields and a few scattered houses. Half a mile west on narrowing 650 N is Prairieville Cemetery, where Richard and Martha Fitzsimmons, Fred's grandfather David, and other members of the extended Fitzsimmons family are buried. Adjacent to the cemetery is the now-vacant Prairieville Christian Church, a brick structure built in 1877. The twenty-foot-high hilltop on which the cemetery and church are located is the highest point in the area and affords a view largely unchanged from when young Fred, his sister, and parents lived just down the road. This agrarian vista from another century is in stark contrast to the commercialized sprawl of Kokomo, a few miles north.
Within a few years after Fred's birth in 1901, the Fitzsimmons family moved away from their Prairie Township farm. Although Tipton County farming in the early 1900s was generally successful, Richard and Ellen recognized that the opportunity to have a more prosperous life for their family would be greater elsewhere. Their 70-acre farm was smaller than average in Prairie Township, and the general trend throughout American agriculture has been consolidation, increasing the average number of acres required for a viable farm.
According to Dick FitzSimmons, his family moved to Illinois. "I don't know why they went to Illinois. It must have been that my other grandparents, the Gordon family, was going over there or was there, so they followed," he explained. Dick believed the family may have briefly lived in Gibson City, Illinois, a small town on the Illinois Central Railroad 120 miles directly west of Tipton County. There, Dick suggested his father may have taken up the shoemaking trade. Before coming to Mishawaka about 1906, the Fitzsimmons family lived in Rockford, 60 miles northwest of Chicago.
The Fitzsimmons family's migration reflects that of millions of Americans during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Not only were waves of immigrants surging into the nation's industrial cities, so, too, were many from America's rural areas. Popular imagination often associates this urbanization and industrialization with the Chicago of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or Booth Tarkington's fictionalized Indianapolis of The Magnificent Ambersons. Smaller industrial cities like Rockford and Mishawaka were also magnets for rural dwellers and immigrants alike. These cities promised better paying jobs and amenities like electricity, telephones, shopping, and culture. Even 50-hour weeks of physical labor and drudgery in a factory may have seemed to many like a big improvement over farm life. The milestone 1920 census would show that for the first time more than half of all Americans lived in cities and towns.
Fred was about five years old when his family moved from Rockford to Mishawaka, a growing industrial center located ninety miles east of Chicago. Settled in 1833 by Alanson Hurd, an entrepreneur in the iron industry, Mishawaka had been a factory town from its inception. Hurd used local bog iron deposits for his St. Joseph Iron Works, and power was generated from a natural fall in the scenic St. Joseph River near the site he chose for his settlement. Numerous industries followed him to Mishawaka, most notably the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company, which produced shoes and boots; the Dodge Manufacturing Company, which specialized in power transmission equipment; and the Perkins Wind Mill Company. Near the turn of the century, each of these factories was reputed to be the largest of its kind in the world. Two major rail lines provided excellent connections to Chicago, Detroit, and New York, aiding Mishawaka industry by bringing in raw materials and transporting away finished goods for sale around the world.
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Excerpted from FREDDIE FITZSIMMONS by PETER J. DE KEVER. Copyright © 2013 Peter J. De Kever. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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