During World War II, Major League teams were so in need of players that they turned to unusual options, including a one-armed outfielder, a one-armed pitcher, and a half-deaf center fielder. But perhaps no one faced as difficult a task as Joe Nuxhall, a 15-year-old pitcher who made his MLB debut with the Cincinnati Reds 80 years ago this month.
Still too young to drive, he took the bus 30 miles from Hamilton, Ohio to Crosley Field in Cincinnati on June 10, 1944 for a Saturday afternoon game. The Reds chose a low-risk moment for his debut, with the home team trailing the first-place St. Louis Cardinals, 13-0, in the top of the ninth inning. Nuxhall retired two of the first three batters he faced, before a confrontation with Stan Musial sent him teetering off a cliff.
The teenager never retired another batter that day, allowing five runs in two-thirds of an inning, and the Reds quickly sent him to the minors, solidifying his MLB ERA at 67.50 over eight years. He finally returned in 1952 to begin a successful major league career.
For the past 80 years, Nuxhall has been recognized as the youngest player in MLB history, a record that seemed unlikely to change since American players must graduate high school to be eligible for the Draft. However, last month, MLB announced it would incorporate Negro Leagues statistics into its record books. In a later Facebook post, official MLB historian John Thorn wrote that Hall of Fame catcher Roy Campanella made his debut with the Washington Elite Giants, a Negro Leagues team, on June 22, 1937. , when he was several months younger than Nuxhall at the time of his MLB debut. “We now have a younger MLB player,” Thorn wrote.
Regardless, Nuxhall’s achievement will always hold a special place in MLB history.
“I took my father’s job away”
Nuxhall had a lot of experience playing against older competition as a kid. Joe Nuxhall’s son, Kim Nuxhall, said in a recent interview that when his father was about 7 years old, the family moved to a farm outside Hamilton and the boy soon began selling to men in their 20s.
Scouts initially had their eyes on Nuxhall’s father, Orville, whom they came to see pitch in a 1943 amateur game in Hamilton. As Joe Nuxhall recalled in a 1976 interview with the New York Times:
“My father, who was about 36 years old, pitched on one team and I pitched on another. These two scouts came to Diamond No. 1 at this gaming complex where we had already started a game. ‘Where is Ox?’ they said. Everyone called my father Ox. “He’s in Diamond No. 3,” someone told them. ‘Who’s that guy throwing?’ asked one of the explorers. “That’s Ox’s son,” they told them. So they stayed and watched me and then invited me to Cincinnati to take a look. My father was also offered a trial, but he had five children to feed and he couldn’t risk it.”
Kim Nuxhall, who pitched for a couple of seasons in the minors, said the Reds had planned to send her grandfather, who she said had the biggest head and biggest hands she had ever seen, to the minor leagues.
“Then the Reds became interested in Dad,” Kim Nuxhall said. “…They wanted to sign dad to a minor league contract and my grandparents said no, and the Reds wouldn’t let it happen,” Kim Nuxhall said. That summer of 1943, Joe Nuxhall took a trip with the Reds to St. Louis. “Can you imagine that train ride with these Major League players and a little boy?” -Kim Nuxhall asked.
The Reds gave him five pocket dollars. “And what did I do with that?” Nuxhall told Sports Illustrated in 1960, when he was an established MLB pitcher. “I went to a dime arcade and spent the five dollars swinging at Iron Mike’s pitches.”
A few months later, in February 1944, the Reds signed a contract with Nuxhall that required obtaining clearance under child labor laws. His parents agreed on the condition that he finish his school year before joining the team. At that point, he was already 6-foot-3 and throwing 85 mph.
“The way I always tell it is that I beat my dad’s job out of my father’s hands,” Joe Nuxhall once joked.
The Reds were missing many of their key pitchers in 1944, including ace Johnny Vander Meer, who had enlisted in the Navy. But the team was excited about its 15-year-old prospect.
“His dad was a semi-pro player and he’s been coaching the kid since he was 9 years old,” Cincinnati Hall of Fame director Bill McKechnie told the KeynoteUSA in March. “Last year, the young left-hander threw two no-hitters and two one-hitters in his Class AA Knothole League.”
He added, in what turned out to be an overly optimistic assessment, “I plan to keep him all summer if he continues to show promise, whether he plays in any games or not. “He will have every opportunity to be a major league player.”
“This guy is not just a wartime flower that will fade into major baseball,” McKechnie told the United Press a month later, just before the start of the regular season. “He has more poise than most young people and he knows all the tricks by instinct.”
Despite his commitment to finish the school year, Nuxhall obtained permission from his school principal to wear a Reds uniform for opening day at Crosley Field, in front of 30,000 fans. But when he made his MLB debut two months later, only 3,500 fans were there to witness it. His parents were not among them.
“None of my family was in the stands to see me, no one thought I would pitch!” he recalled in Alan Schwarz’s book, “Once Upon a Game: Baseball’s Greatest Memories,” a collection of first-person recollections from baseball legends and famous fans.
Nuxhall told SI that it was only the fifth or sixth major league game he had attended, and he sat in the dugout as a spectator.
“Suddenly Mr. McKechnie said, ‘Joe, warm up,’” he recalled. “I came out of the dugout and tripped on the top step. “I fell flat on my face.” When he went to the bullpen, he said, “I was shaking like an airplane engine in a palm tree.”
With a borrowed pair of baseball shoes and a worn-out Vander Meer glove that was about to fall apart, Nuxhall didn’t need to use any signs with his catcher because back then he could only throw fastballs. He retired the first man he faced on a groundout, walked the next and induced an infield fly for the second out, before walking Debs Garms. Musial, the reigning National League Most Valuable Player who had hit a league-best .357 in 1943, entered the batter’s box with two on and two out.
The way Nuxhall describes his thinking at this point evokes that old joke where a cartoon character wanders happily along a ledge impervious to gravity, until he looks down, realizes where he is, and falls into chopped to the ground.
“Up to the plate came Stan Musial, one of the most dangerous hitters of all time,” Nuxhall recalled. “Where he was at (pitching in the major leagues at age 15) finally hit me. This was no longer pitching against 13-year-olds at Wilson Junior High. This was Stan Musial! Stan hit my pitch to right field… and then I really broke down. “Suddenly I couldn’t throw a strike.”
Now the bases were loaded and Nuxhall walked. And other. And after that another one. Emil Verban then singled to left field to drive in two more runs, making the score 18-0. There’s no mercy rule in the major leagues, but his manager, McKechnie, finally showed some mercy to his pitcher.
“That’s enough, boy,” he said, as he pulled it out. Nuxhall’s final line: two-thirds of an inning, two hits, five earned runs, five walks, no strikeouts. The Cardinals’ 18-0 victory was the most lopsided shutout in the National League since 1906. That year they would win the World Series.
“I wasn’t happy with how I did it, but it was such a whirlwind that it was hard to understand anyway,” Nuxhall reflects in Schwarz’s book.
“What really stays in my mind, even to this day, more than 60 years later, is what would have happened if I had gotten the third out of that inning with just a walk. Would they have given me another chance? Would my confidence have increased and I would have stayed on the team? Would I have spent my teenage years as a major league pitcher?
With none of his family at the stadium that afternoon, Nuxhall “simply walked alone to the bus station, paid my 50 cents and returned to Hamilton.”
When he got home, his parents were excited that he had participated in a game, but there wasn’t much time to mark the occasion. The Reds soon sent him to the minor league Birmingham Barons.
Kim Nuxhall said her father did not accompany the Barons on their trips, so while he stayed he could watch the Negro League team, the Black Barons, where he once saw legendary pitcher Satchel Paige place a gum wrapper in the outside corner of home plate and throws a baseball just over it.
As if the baseball gods were playing a cruel joke on him, Nuxhall’s stats with the Barons were nearly identical to his MLB numbers that season: one inning pitched, five walks (again), and six earned runs for a horrible ERA of 54.00.
He bounced back the following year, winning 10 games with a 2.57 ERA in his first full minor league season. In 1946, he paused to earn his high school diploma. Although he was unable to compete on the baseball team, he was allowed to play football and basketball as a senior and received several college scholarship offers for those sports.
From teenager to ‘the old lefty’
Nuxhall rejoined the Reds organization and bounced around the minors until 1952, when he finally returned to Cincinnati at age 23. Things went much better this time: He threw three scoreless innings out of the bullpen in his first appearance, struck out three, and finished the season with a 3.22 ERA.
In 1955, Nuxhall won 17 games, led the National League in shutouts, and was a star for the first of two consecutive seasons. When he retired in 1966 with a career ERA of 3.90, he had been around long enough to have a nickname that belied his teenage start: “the old lefty.” (He was also known as “Nuxy”).
After his pro career, he became a beloved Reds radio announcer, teaming with a young Al Michaels in the early ’70s and later with Marty Brennaman. Nuxhall signed the broadcasts: “This is the old lefty, he turns third and heads home,” a phrase that now appears on a sign outside the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati. There is also a statue of him as a 15-year-old pitcher in the entrance plaza in front of the stadium. Nuxhall died in 2007.
One day during his television career, Kim and Joe Nuxhall were playing golf in Arizona during spring training. While they were on the tee, Joe Nuxhall told his son that he would be right back and went to greet a golfer on another tee.
“He comes back and I said, ‘Who was that?’” Kim Nuxhall recalled. “And he said, ‘Oh, that was Stan.’
“Yeah, that was Stan.”
Apparently, there are no hard feelings.
Keynote USA
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