CEMETERY WINS ABOVE REPLACEMENT, Vol. 6
Iowa, West Virginia, Arizona, Oregon, Mississippi, & Nebraska
Welcome to Vol. 6 of our baseball cemetery tour. Our first two stops today - Iowa and West Virginia - are framed as a travelog, a vacation planner, or a roadside attractions mapper. Then we zip through Arizona, Oregon, Mississippi, and Nebraska to get us almost to the halfway point.
Confused? Here’s the introduction that will catch you up on our method and our primary metric, WARpC (Wins Above Replacement per Cemetery).
And here’s a handy chart of where we’ve been.
First up: Iowa. And Iowa baseball tourism is loaded. Field of Dreams, ovb, plus three affiliated minor league teams:
Iowa Cubs (Des Moines, AAA, Cubs)
Quad City River Bandits (Davenport, High-A, Royals)
Cedar Rapids Kernels (High-A, Twins)
Two Prospect League teams: Clinton Lumber Kings, Burlington Bees
And one American Association Indy team: Sioux City Explorers.
On to our main attraction, mostly-forgotten dead guys who were better at baseball than 99% of all humans: Earl Whitehill (36.8 WAR, Cedar Memorial Park, Cedar Rapids) and Hal Trosky (29.9 WAR, St. Michael Cemetery, Norway), leaders in the state’s WARpC chart.
Whitehill pitched to a perfectly league-average 100 ERA+ over his seventeen year career. He is possibly most famous for his short fuse, knocking Lou Gehrig unconscious with a pitch as he was nearing the consecutive games-played record.
Trosky hit thirty-five homers as a rookie in 1933, setting an MLB record at the time. He went on to play eleven seasons with Cleveland, interrupted for two years by World War II, but still finished with an impressive 130 OPS+.
The two faced each other in 1934. Whitehill naturally hit Trosky with a fastball to the ribs. They became close friends after their baseball careers. Whitehill’s grave marker in Cedar Rapids features his signature and a baseball glove. Trosky’s grave marker is modest, but the town he eternally resides in is not at all shy about its love of baseball.
Starting out from Chicago, google maps and I suggest this Iowa tourism route: Field of Dreams (near Dubuque) —> Clinton —> Davenport —> Burlington —> Cedar Rapids —> Norway —> Des Moines. Sorry Sioux City, too far.
Don’t sleep on that Norway stop. The tiny town (Pop: 446) hosts the Norway Baseball Hall of Fame (Bruce Kimm! Mike Boddicker!) , and the Iowa Baseball Museum of Norway. Hal Trosky makes central appearances at both.
Norway, Iowa, has apparently been baseball crazy for decades. Baseball movie The Final Season (2007) was shot there and is based on a true story. Between 1967 and 1990, the Norway High baseball team won 19 State Championships, but in 1991, the school was to be merged into a larger district, ending the baseball program forever. Longtime coach Jim Van Scoyoc (Powers Boothe) was pushed out and a rookie coach (Sean Astin) was brought in for the final season. Boothe, Astin, co-stars Rachael Leigh Cook, Tom Arnold, and director David Mickey Evans (The Sandlot, The Sandlot 2), can’t overcome a cliché-riddled script (even for a baseball movie) or clunky plot lines. Spoiler: Norway wins their 20th state championship against all odds. There. Now you don’t have to sit through this well-meaning, but thoroughly bland 90 minutes like I did. I didn’t hate myself after watching it, but now my Amazon Prime recommendations are filled with faith-based baseball flicks.
Back to our vacation guide.
MLB’s consolidation of the minor leagues in 2021 gutted affiliated baseball in West Virginia. Still, some fun baseball can be found in the MLB-partnered collegiate Appalachian League:
Bluefield Ridge Runners, Princeton Whistle Pigs, West Virginia Black Bears (Granville, WV).
The independent Atlantic League is also represented by the Charleston Dirty Birds.
Starting from the closest major city, you could make this drive: Pittsburgh (PA) → Wheeling → Granville → Charleston → Princeton → Bluefield. The whole trip is less than seven hours. That’s a nice week of baseball, if you can make the calendar work.
That road trip includes a detour to see the first-ever West Virginian to make the AL/NL Major Leagues, “Pebbly Jack” Glasscock (61.5 WAR, Greenwood Cemetery, Wheeling). It was with the Cleveland Blues in 1879. His nickname stemmed from his habit of scouring infields for small rocks. It must have worked, as he led the league in fielding percentage six times, cementing his other nickname, “King of Shortstops.”
Fellow West Virginian Lewis Robert “Hack” Wilson (38.2 WAR, Rosedale Cemetery, Martinsburg) earned a spot in the Hall of Fame, despite a career cut short from alcoholism. He was a modern style hitter in the 1920s, leading the league in strikeouts as often as home runs (five times each). During his peak with the Cubs (1926-1931), he had an OPS of 1.002 and averaged 32 home runs a season. Martinsburg is way over by Frederick, MD, so that probably doesn’t make it into this trip. Sorry, Hack.
On we go, four quick one-stop states.
Arizona’s only buried Hall of Famer is John “Jocko” Conlan (-.6 WAR, Green Acres Memorial Gardens, Scottsdale). He played two years of unremarkable center field in the 1930s, but was elected to Cooperstown in 1974, after a twenty-five-year career umpiring.
Conlan often butted heads (and shins) with Dodgers/ Giants manager Leo Durocher. Durocher liked to hob-knob with celebrities, at one point asking Conlan if singer Danny Kaye could sit in the dugout during a game. The request was denied. “You’ve got to have a thick skin and a strong heart. You’ve got to have and command respect. Without them, you’re nothing,” Conlan said.
As our other beat is baseball songs, here’s Kaye’s 1962 song “D-O-D-G-E-R-S”. It’s a baseball game play-by-play delivered as scat jazz, with a call-out of umpire Conlan.
Cepeda runs to field the ball; And Hiller covers first
Haller runs to back up Hiller; Hiller crashes into Miller
Miller falls, drops the ball; Conlan calls "Safe!" Yay, Conlan!
Cepeda runs to field the ball; So does Hiller, so does Miller
Miller hollers "Hiller"; Hiller hollers "Miller";
Haller hollers "Hiller"; Points to Miller with his fist
And that's the Hiller Miller Haller Hallelujah Twist!
I’d love to have ID’d this exact game, but no game logs match the lyrics. I looked. Maybe Kaye chose not to reproduce or retransmit or disseminate the accounts and descriptions without the express written consent of the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. Maybe.
Red Sox legend Bobby Doerr (51.41 WAR, Rest Lawn Memorial Park, Junction City) is the only Hall of Famer buried in Oregon, but he doesn’t lead the state in WAR or notoriety. Carl Mays’ (51.49 WAR, Riverview Cemetery, Portland) edges him out. Mays’ reputation as having “the disposition of a man with a permanent toothache,” and the fact that he is the only pitcher to throw a pitch that led to the death of a ballplayer (Ray Chapman, August, 1920), secures Mays as the most infamous. The Pitch That Killed by Mike Sowell takes a deep dive into both men.
Mississippi’s WARpC is boosted by two pitchers buried in the south-eastern corner of the state: Hall of Famer Jay “Dizzy” Dean (46.1 WAR, Bond Cemetery, Bond) and workhorse Claude Passeau (45.1 WAR, Magnolia Cemetery, Lucedale). If you drive north to Pearl for a Double-A Braves game, continue on to see 1970s slugging first baseman George “Boomer” Scott (Lakewood Cemetery, Greenville, 36.5 WAR) to round out the state leaders.
Nebraska has but one pinnacle of WARpC in the state and that’s Grover Cleveland “Pete” Alexander (116 WAR, Elmwood Cemetery, St. Paul). He is famously “the only ballplayer named for a sitting U.S. president and portrayed on film by a future one, Ronald Reagan in The Winning Team (1952).” Read about that movie in our post about the Doris Day baseball trilogy. While you’re out in the sticks of Nebraska visiting Pete, you might as well drive the forty-five minutes to visit catcher Les Nunamaker (11.7 WAR, Aurora Cemetery, Aurora) who threw out three base runners in a single inning in 1914, and left-handed spit-baller Clarence Mitchell (23.7 WAR) who had an eighteen-year career, but might be most remembered for hitting into a triple-play and a double-play in a single 1920 World Series game.
However you happen onto these cemetery travelogs (“I used to make out with my high school girlfriend in that graveyard!”), I hope you enjoy them.
When you have the time, go have a catch overtop the remains of an 1800s ballplayer. As much as I love a good ghost story, I have no illusion that our actions could impact the spirit of the long-ago departed. As my accountant Chuck used to say, “When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
It’s our spirit that will be affected by taking the time to remember these ballplayers, looking up a few factoids, committing some arcane statistic to memory, and getting some sunshine on a summer afternoon.
Great stuff Jay, as always!
Yes- never knew about Lou Gehrig! Did some brief Googling on ALS causes and found interesting stuff; military veterans, combat vets or not, are more prone, and 90% of cases are non-genetic related, but currently there seems to be no correlation with CTE/head trauma.
Didn't know Hack Wilson was a W. Virginian. Built exactly like Kirby Puckett and a sad post-career story.
More on Charleston Dirtybirds:
"The West Virginia Power joined the Legends in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, an independent MLB Partner league, for the 2021 season and beyond. On September 28, 2021, the team officially changed their name to the Charleston Dirty Birds, a reference to the canary in a coal mine."
I want to hear more about the Lou Gehrig incident!