By Woodrow Carroll
Major League Baseball (MLB) has a history that stretches back more than a 120 years. With such an extended history, there is a wealth of stories of the individuals who made MLB what it is today.
Walter “Duster” Mails, Howard Ehmke, and Gene Bearden were not Hall of Fame pitching entrants. Their stories, however, were the stuff of legends, in their own ways.
• Mails, a pitcher, won more than 200 games in the minor leagues. Mails was good enough to get a shot at the majors and in 1920 he found himself with the Cleveland Indians.
Lifetime, Mails’ record was 32-25 in the big leagues. The 1920 season was his finest by far.
The Indians were 98-56 in 1920 and captured the American League championship by two games over the Chicago White Sox. The eight White Sox players called out in the Black Sox Scandal covering the 1919 World Series were not indicted until the tail end of the 1920 season and most were still on the 1920 Sox. Cleveland was 12-10 against the Sox in 1920. “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, the most celebrated of the tainted Sox players, hit for a.382 average and drove in 121 runs. The Indians clearly earned the American League championship!
Needing victories from Mails, the Indians received them in 1920. His won-loss record was 7-0.
The 1920 World Series was a best-of-nine against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers often were called Trolley Dodgers or Robins at the time. The Indians captured the series, five games to two with Mails a 1-0 winning pitcher in game six.
Mails was a respectable 14-8 in 1921 for Cleveland which finished second to the New York Yankees. After a couple of lackluster seasons, Mails was back in the minors.
• Ehmke was a solid major league pitcher with a 166-166 lifetime won-loss record, however, it is what Ehmke did near the end of his career that earned his reputation.
On the Philadelphia Athletics’ pitching staff in 1929, Ehmke’s record was 7-2 on a team that had run away with the AL championship.
Shockingly, A’s manager, Connie Mack, started Ehmke in game one of the 1929 World Series against the Chicago Cubs. Ehmke, who had pitched a total of 55 innings that season, struck out 13 Cubs in a 3-1 victory. Philadelphia went on to capture the World Series in five games.
The 1929 World Series was Ehmke’s last grasp in baseball. He was cut by the A’s the next year. That, however, was not the end of the story.
Ehmke made a name for himself after his playing days in the tarpaulin business! Prior to the end of his baseball career, Ehmke started making tarps to cover baseball infields and, later, football fields. Was he successful? The Ehmke Manufacturing Company in Philadelphia is going strong today.
• Bearden, similar to Mails and Ehmke, ended up winning a World Series game in an otherwise unremarkable pitching career.
In 1948 Bearden had a dream season. He was 20-7 in the regular season for the Cleveland Indians. He pitched the Indians past the Boston Red Sox, 8-3, in a one-game playoff to determine the AL champion.
In the World Series, Bearden beat the Boston Braves, 2-0, in game three, and came on in relief of Bob Lemon in game six in a 4-3 Indians’ victory to give Cleveland the Series, four games to two.
Bearden never came close to replicating his 1948 season. He bounced around the majors, last pitching for the Chicago White Sox in 1953.