This was supposed to be the first weekend of the Major League Baseball season but, as we all know by now, the season has been indefinitely placed on the injured list thanks to the coronavirus.
With no live baseball to watch, I thought this would be a good time to finish something I’ve been contemplating for years:
Who would be included in the starting lineup and full roster of native-born West Virginians who played in the major leagues? What better time for this than the dismal present?
The list of eligible players is easily sourced through Baseballreference.com, which tells me that 120 Mountain State natives, including 62 who have pitched, made it to The Show.
Who makes the cut on our team? I started with four basic criteria:
n Players must be born in West Virginia for inclusion. That leaves out some stellar major leaguers like Nick Swisher, who played four years of high school ball in Parkersburg but was born in Columbus, Ohio while his dad, Steve Swisher, was nearing the end of his nine-year major-league career as a catcher.
n Length of a player’s career must be considered, since we don’t want any flashes in the pan or mighta-beens.
n More importantly, we’re looking at the quality of each player’s career. That means we’ll take a close look at the numbers.
n Finally, the whims of the selection committee — me — will be the final arbiter.
In compliance with the governor’s stay-at-home order and ever-vigilant about adhering to social-distancing norms, I’ve selected this team all by myself. You have no one to yell at but me.
All statistics were culled from the aforementioned Baseballreference.com, with supplemental biographical information found at SABR.org., and sabermetric analysis/ratings as listed in “The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract” (2001).
My All-West Virginia MLB team includes players from Chester to Welch and all points in between, but there’s a definite tilt toward the northern panhandle. Three of our starters and two of our bench-warmers were born in Wheeling, and our cleanup hitter claims Glen Dale as his place of birth.
Three of our lads made it all the way to the Hall of Fame. Well, four, if you include one starter who’s been inducted in two football Halls of Fame.
I think it’s a pretty darn good squad. Maybe not as good as native-born teams from, say, California, Florida, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and some other larger states, but I bet we can beat the tar out of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and either of the Dakotas.
Play ball!
Starting lineup
1. Leading off and playing shortstop is Wheeling’s Jack Glasscock, whose 17-year career (1879-95) included a National League-leading .336 batting average in 1890 for the New York Giants. It’s fitting that Glasscock gets things started. He was, after all, the first West Virginia native to ascend to the major leagues (at age 21 with the 1879 Cleveland Blues).
Glasscock would have been an All-Star, if such a thing existed during his playing career. Leading up to that batting title in his age-32 season, Glasscock routinely appeared among the league leaders in numerous offensive and defensive categories throughout the 1880s. He led the league in hits twice (1889-90) and was among the top 10 in stolen bases four times (career-best of 62 in 1887).
And he was a whiz with the — well, not with the glove, since players didn’t start wearing gloves until late in Glasscock’s career. But glove or no glove, he was really good defensively. He led the league in fielding percentage and assists six times each. Bill James, in assigning Gold Gloves through a sabermetric lens, sees Glasscock meriting that honor four times.
James ranks Glassock No. 43 on his all-time shortstop list, right between Garry Templeton (42) and Larry Bowa (44).
Maybe not a Hall of Famer, but Glasscock is someone you’d be glad to have in a key position on your team. His nomadic 17-year career (with nine different teams) ended with a splendid .290 career batting average.
2. Batting second and playing right field is a Mountain State favorite of much more recent vintage, John Kruk, who was born in Charleston but first attracted the attention of big-league scouts at Keyser High School in the state’s eastern panhandle.
Baseball fans today know Kruk best as the folksy, witty and somewhat rotund commentator during his broadcasting stints with Fox Sports and ESPN, but they also might remember him as a three-time All-Star (with the Philadelphia Phillies from 1991-93), a World Series participant (he hit .348 in the Phils’ six-game Series loss to Toronto in 1993) and a career .300 hitter (with a nice round 100 home runs) over his 10 seasons in the bigs.
Kruk’s best season was probably 1993, when he hit .316 with 14 home runs, 85 RBIs and a .430 on-base percentage (second in the National League), but it was hardly distinguishable from his other All-Star seasons — .323, 10 homers 70 ribbies in 1992 and .294, 21 and 92 in 1991. Kruk earned MVP votes all three years.
3. Batting third and playing left field is Wheeling-born Jesse Burkett, the first of three baseball Hall of Famers in our starting lineup and the first West Virginia native to earn that distinction.
Nicknamed “The Crab” for his surly disposition, Burkett was, in some ways, the polar opposite of the happy-go-lucky Kruk. Burkett was ejected from both ends of an 1897 doubleheader.
But, boy, could he hit. Burkett’s lifetime .338 batting average over his 16-year career includes back-to-back NL-leading .400 seasons (.405 in 1895, .410 in 1896, both with the Cleveland Spiders). His 240 hits in ’96 was a record until Ty Cobb hit safely 248 times in 1911. Burkett won a third batting title after hitting .376 with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1901.
He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1946. James ranked him No. 14 among left fielders, between Joe Medwick (13) and Lou Brock (15).
4. Hitting cleanup and starting at first base is Glen Dale’s George Brett, the only West Virginia native to be elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. James ranks Brett No. 2 all-time at third base, behind only Mike Schmidt.
(Why, you ask, is Brett starting at first base instead of third? Three reasons: He played a lot at first toward the end of his 21-year career; Kruk, who mostly played first base, played a lot in the outfield, where there is a dearth of native West Virginians; and moving Brett to first base opened up a spot in the lineup for the No. 5 hitter, for whom I had to find a spot as a starter. See below.)
Brett and his family — including older brother Ken, who had a 14-year MLB of his own — left West Virginia for California when George was 2 years old, but by accident of birth, he winds up on our team.
Brett is the answer to one of my favorite trivia questions: Who is the only player to win batting titles in three different decades? He led the American League by hitting .333 in 1976, .390 in 1980 (when he was named AL MVP) and .329 in 1990.
It all added up to a great career, all with the Kansas City Royals, in which he finished with 3,154 hits (now 18th all-time) and a .305 batting average, along with 317 home runs and 1,596 RBIs. Both the latter numbers are the most, by far, of any West Virginia native.
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5. Batting fifth and playing third base is Toby Harrah of Sissonville, who was named to four AL All-Star teams during his 17-year career (1972-86), mostly with the Texas Rangers and Cleveland Indians. Like Brett, Harrah left West Virginia at an early age and grew up elsewhere — in Harrah’s case, Marion, Ohio.
James listed Harrah as the No. 32-ranked third baseman, slightly ahead of the likes of Gary Gaetti, Ken Keltner and Terry Pendleton. (Note: The NBJHBA was published in 2001.)
Harrah finished with 195 home runs (season-high of 27 in 1977), 918 RBIs (93 in 1975) and a career average of .264 (.304 with Cleveland in 1982 was his only .300 season).
Versatility was Harrah’s trademark, playing 1,099 games at third base, 813 at shortstop and 244 at second base. He also had a great eye, leading the AL in bases on balls (109) in 1977 and drawing 113 walks in 1985 at age 36, producing his career-best .432 on-base percentage.
6. Batting sixth, our third Hall of Famer, second baseman Bill Mazeroski, who was born in Wheeling but spent most of his youth across the river in Ohio.
Some eyebrows were raised when Maz was elected by the Veteran’s Committee in 2000, but two things are hard to dispute: his defensive prowess, and the fact that his World Series-winning home run in 1960 ranks at or near the top of every list of baseball’s greatest moments.
Mazeroski’s home run leading off the bottom of the ninth for the Pittsburgh Pirates against the New York Yankees’ Ralph Terry broke a 9-9 tie and remains the only game-ending Game 7 home run in World Series history.
He didn’t hit that much — .260, 138 home runs, 853 RBIs in a 17-year career, all with the Pirates. Most of his 10 All-Star Game appearances were due to his defensive work.
An eight-time Gold Glover, Mazeroski, to this day, holds the record for double plays turned by a second baseman (1,706). He led the National League in that department every year from 1960 to 1967.
7. Batting seventh is Parkersburg native Earle “Greasy” Neale, who left a distinctive mark on the diamond but went on to even greater fame in another sport. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1967 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Neale played major-league baseball from 1916 to 1924, and stayed busy during the off-season as a college football coach at West Virginia Wesleyan (his alma mater), Marietta College, Washington & Jefferson and Virginia. In 1917, he led Wesleyan to a 20-0 upset victory over West Virginia University, and his 1921 W&J team was invited to the Rose Bowl to play against California. The game ended in a scoreless tie.
WVU, duly impressed, hired Neale as its head coach in 1931 and he compiled a 12-16-3 record in three seasons with the Mountaineers. He spent the next seven seasons as the backfield coach at Yale before moving up to the NFL in 1941, starting a 10-year head-coaching career with the Philadelphia Eagles that included back-to-back NFL championships (7-0 over the Chicago Cardinals in 1948 and 14-0 over the Los Angeles Rams in 1949).
Back to baseball. Neale had a decent eight-year big-league career, mostly with Cincinnati, from 1916 to 1924. His best season was his second in 1917, when he batted .294. He finished with a .259 career batting average.
Neale’s career baseball highlight was the World Series ring he won with the Reds in 1919. That, of course, is the year of the Black Sox Scandal, which led to the lifetime banishment of eight Chicago White Sox players for their involvement with gamblers to purposely lose the World Series to the Reds.
Neale, who went to his grave insisting that the Series was on the up and up, batted .357 in the 1919 World Series, going 10 for 28.
8. Batting eighth and catching, born in Pierce in Tucker County, is Andy Seminick.
He played 15 years (1943-57) with the Phillies and Reds, and lasted so long mostly due to his powerful bat, which produced 164 home runs. Seminick was an All-Star selection in 1949, the first of his back-to-back 24-home run seasons, and he picked up MVP votes in 1950 when he hit .288 and helped Philadelphia win its first National League pennant since 1915.
In 1969, Phillies fans voted Seminick, who finished with a .243 lifetime average but a respectable .417 slugging percentage, as their all-time catcher. If he’s good enough for them, he’s good enough for us.
9. And batting ninth and pitching, Nitro-born Lew Burdette, who, like Mazeroski, will forever be known for knocking the dynastic Yankees off the top of the baseball mountain.
Warren Spahn may have been the ace of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves pitching staff, but it was Burdette who notched three complete-game World Series victories over the Bronx Bombers, including shutouts in Game 5 (1-0) and, on two days rest, Game 7 (5-0). He was, of course, named World Series MVP.
That was the highlight of Burdette’s 18-year career (1950-67), but there were plenty of other high marks. In the six-year stretch from 1956 to 1961, he averaged 19 wins (114-68), had a league-leading 2.70 ERA in 1956 and back-to-back 20-win seasons (20-10 in 1958 and 21-15 in 1959).
On Aug. 18, 1960, Burdette pitched a no-hitter in Milwaukee against the Phillies, facing the minimum 27 batters in a 1-0 win. A fifth-inning hit batsman (Tony Gonzalez) was the only base runner Burdette allowed, but Gonzalez was erased on a double play.
Burdette, a three-time All-Star, finished his career with 208 wins.
Bench
n Pitchers: The hardest decision while making this team was choosing the No.1 pitcher, and it was between Burdette and Wilbur Cooper (Bearsville: 216-178, 2.89, 1912-26, mostly with the Pirates). The rest of the 10-man pitching staff consists of Win Mercer (Chester), Huntington’s Rick Reed, Sheriff Blake (Ansted), Max Butcher (Holden), Jock Menefee (Rowlesburg), Chuck Stobbs (Wheeling), Jack Warhop (Hinton) and George Baumgardner (Barboursville).
n Catchers: Steve Yeager (Huntington) and John Wockenfuss (Welch).
n Infielders: Gene Freese (Wheeling), Jedd Gyorko (Morgantown; the only active player on this team) and Dick Hoblitzell (Waverly).
n Outfielders: Farmer Weaver (Parkersburg) and Del Gainer (Montrose).
Manager
I’ve gotta go with Northfork-born Charlie Manuel, who had a career managerial record of 1,000-826 and a World Series championship with the Phillies in 2008.
Coaches
Doc Edwards (Red Jacket, had three season as the Indians’ manager in the late 1980s); J.R. House (Charleston, now the Reds’ third-base coach); and Steve Swisher (Parkersburg, had long career as a minor-league manager). Note that all three coaches are former catchers.
Now bring on the Dakotas!
