Swoonin' A's, 9-16-55: Short, sweet 16 as hometown teen debuts

Alex George was 16 when he made his major league debut with his hometown team, the Kansas City Athletics, on Sept. 16, 1955. He played in four more games the rest of the season, but never again in the big leagues.

By Phil Ellenbecker

  Six months into their first year in the American League in Kansas City, the Athletics didn't need the sideshow attractions with which owner Charlie Finley tried to bring in fans during the 1960s. No mechanical rabbits popping up behind home plate to deliver balls to the umpires, no sheep grazing in the outfield, no mules for mascots, etc.

  People were excited enough just to have major league baseball in town, the A's having moved this year from Philadelphia. Good attendance was practically guaranteed night in and night out at Municipal Stadium.

  That was the case Friday night, Sept. 16, as 29,875 showed up for a meaningless late-season game between the A's and Chicago White Sox. It was the last home series of the year for Kansas City.

  But a move the A's made that night smacks of the attention-grabbing '60s.

  With two outs in the eighth inning and Kansas City gliding toward a 13-7 victory, manager Lou Boudreau sent Alex George up to bat for shortstop Jerry Schypinski.

  George was 16 years, 385 days old, 5-foot-11, 170 pounds, and had just been signed by the A's, whose minor league teams had all finished their seasons. He is listed as the sixth-youngest to play in a major league game since World War I. Three of them, including the youngest — 15-year-old Joe Nuxhall of the Cincinnati Reds — made their debuts during World War II, when teams were desperate to fill rosters vacated by men in the service.

  A left-handed batter and right-handed thrower, George had been a four-sport superstar at Rockhurst High School in suburban Kansas City, Missouri, then spent the summer of 1955 playing in the local Ban Johnson League. He'd received an $18,000 bonus spread over two years. According to a 2016 article by Chuck Hildrebrandt for the Baseball Research Journal, that mysteriously fell outside the "bonus baby" rules of the time that stated if a first-time amateur received a bonus over $4,000, he had to be placed on the team’s big-league roster for two seasons. Yet here the A's were wasting no time in throwing him to the major league wolves when suppposedly they didn't have to.

  (Hildrebrandt's was the only citation I could find of sidestepping the bonus rule. According to a 2016 Kansas City Star article by Rich Sugg, as quoted by Bradford Lee at royalsreview.com, the deal was $10,000 spread over two seasons, with three years of spring training guaranteed. Sandy Koufax is an example of a player who had to stay with the big club because of bonus rules. He, too, made his major league debut in 1955 and never ended up going down to the minor leagues.)

  “It’s all a strange circumstance,” George told The Star of his decision to sign. “Everything was spur of the moment.”  

  When George came up to bat, he faced Al Papai, the last of five White Sox pitchers on the night, who also happened to be pitching his final inning of a four-year career in the major leagues. White Sox catcher Sherm Lollar offered some help to George. 

  “You ever see a knuckleball?” Lollar asked George, according to The Star.

  “No,” George replied.

  “That’s all this guy throws. So now you know what’s coming.”

  “I get into the batter’s box, and I've got to tell you, my knees are shaking so hard, maybe he felt sorry for me,” George told The Star, referring to Lollar's "advice."  

  After fouling off a few pitches, George struck out. He then took the field at short for the top of the ninth and had to be on his toes, for with one out Chico Carrasquel sent a ground ball at him that he handled, and he got out No. 2 by going to Vic Power at first base. Then, with runners at second and third bases, he recorded out No. 3 when he speared a line shot by "Jungle Jim" Rivera that appeared headed for a base hit.

  As George was heading off the field he flipped the ball to Power, and Power gave it right back. George doesn’t know what happened to the ball from his debut, but he’ll never forget the exchange, he told The Star.

  So that was the ballgame, and a few days later that was it for George's major league career. He appeared in four more games the rest of the season, got to bat 10 more times, struck out six more times, got one hit and drew one walk. In the field he had six putouts, five assists and one error at shortstop.

  He never again appeared in a major league game. He started the next season in Class D ball, probably where he should have started 1955, and spent eight seasons in the minor leagues, seven in the Athletics’ organization. George kept showing promise. He rose as high as the AA level, and four times he reached double figures in homers. George's best season in pro ball was 1958 with Class C Pocatello, when he hit .282 with 23 homers and 90 RBIs.

  But by age 23, surgery on his right shoulder had sapped his throwing strength, George had started a family, and he figured his time was up. He quit baseball at age 23, in 1963, after hitting .207 in 136 games with York, a Double-A Washington Senators farm club. 

  “It wasn’t too difficult to walk away,” he said.

10 days in the majors

  Since we don't have much to cover, here's a closer look at the rest of Alex George's major league career after the night of Sept. 16:

  --Sept. 18, in Kansas City before 31,034, Athletics defeated Chicago 8-1. George again pinch hit for Schypinski in the eighth inning and again struck out. He got an unassisted putout in the ninth off the bat of Earl Battey.                                                                                             

  (Schypinki himself was a one-and-doner, playing in 22 games this season and never again in the big leagues.)
  --Sept. 19, at Detroit, Tigers won 4-0. George got his first start that night at Briggs Stadium and went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts before being pinch hit for in the seventh.  At short he recorded two putouts and one assist.
  --Sept. 20, at Detroit, Tigers won 7-3. George was back in the starting lineup and this time played the whole game. He also got his first and only major league hit. He led off the game by beating out a drag bunt toward third base for a single off Duke Maas. He was put out at second on Gus Zernial's inning-ending double play grounder to third. He walked against Jim Bunning leading off the ninth and was forced out at second on a fielder's choice grounder to first by Tom Saffell.
  In his other three trips to the plate he struck out twice and hit into an inning-ending force play.
  At short he tallied three assists and two putouts, committed one error and turned one double play.
  The twin killing was of the unusual variety. With one out in the fourth and Al Kaline at third and Bill Tuttle at first, Ray Boone hit a grounder to second baseman Schypinki, who flipped to George to get Tuttle at second. Kaline was out at home on a play that went George-to-first baseman Harry Simpson-to catcher Billy Shantz, according to retrosheet.org's play-by-play.
  So George can say that he was involved in an inning-ending double play that put out a future Hall of Famer in Kaline at home. And he drew a walk from another future Hall of Famer in Bunning.
  His error came on a ball by Chick King leading off the third.
  --Sept. 25, at Chicago, White Sox win 5-0: After all that excitement the Tuesday night of Sept. 20, George sat down for the series finale with Detroit the next night, and for the first two games of a season-ending series at Chicago.
  However, he had one last "hurrah" in Sunday's season finale. Again, he subbed for Schypinki at short, replacing him in the field in the bottom of the seventh. He came up in the next inning, with one out, and again struck out. He had no chances in the field.
  And such was the short major league life of Alex George.

Alex George talks in 2014 about his brief major league career with the Kansas City Athletics. George went into sales and sales management with local radio and television after his eight-year professional baseball career was over. 

George the Jayhawk

  According to a 2014 Shawnee Mission Post article by Dan Blom, George passed on football scholarship offers from Big Eight schools but was set to play baseball and basketball at the University of Kansas and was enrolled as a freshman there, with classes two days away from starting, when he got a call from the A’s. They wanted to sign him to a contract and have him finish the season with them. “I never have been accused of thinking too far ahead,” George says of his decision to sign with the A's.

  George, who went into sales and sales management in local radio and television after his baseball career was over and retired to the Kansas City suburb of Prairie Village in Kansas, recalls a basketball coach at KU introducing him to another new arrival on campus that fall -- the legendary Wilt Chamberlain.

Trying out shortstops

  George was one of four shortstops trotted out in 1955 by Boudreau, who knew a little bit about the position having put together a Hall of Fame career at short. Joe DeMaestri played 123 games there, while Schypinski and Jack Littrell played 22 apiece and George five.  By the next year only DeMaestri remained, and he went on to become an All-Star and led American League shortstops in fielding percentage in 1957 and 1958.

  (DeMaestri's Society for American Baseball Research biography doesn't mention him being injured in 1955, but he didn't play in any games after Aug. 30.)

Not the batboy

  According to the Post article, DeMaestri stuck up for George in a humourous way when George first showed up in the A's clubhouse.

  "When George found his locker at Municipal Stadium that first day, he remembers a player asking infielder Joe DeMaestri if the new kid was the batboy," Blom wrote. "DeMaestri, George recalls, told the other player that George was actually joining the team: 'I think the batboy’s older,' Demaestri said."

Embraced in K.C.

  The crowds of 29,875 and 31,034 the A's drew in George's first two games, in their final home series of the season, were indicative of the warm reception the A's received in their first year in K.C. Their attendance for the year was 1,393,095, second in the American League behind the mighty New York Yankees' 1,490,138 and an average of 18,330 a game.

  “I thought it was great that the Athletics moved to Kansas City,” DeMaestri said in his SABR biography written by  Joseph Wancho. “The fans who watched us in Municipal Stadium were polite, win or lose. They couldn’t have been happier. They were knowledgeable about baseball because for years they had supported the Yankees’ minor league team, the Kansas City Blues. They were so excited to get a major league team, and we had a lot of pride being that team.”

Home cooking

  George caught a feel for that baseball vibe at Municipal, where the legendary Negro League team the Monarchs also played, as a boy growing up in the Brookside neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. It's understandable that he'd bite at the opportunity to sign with the hometown team and play for them at such an early age.

  "My dad would pack us in the car and we would drive down Brooklyn Avenue, past the ballpark during a game and you could hear, you couldn’t see what was going on but you could certainly hear the fans," he recalled in a 2014 article written by Sam Zeff for the KCUR public radio station website. "There’d be 10 or 15 other cars that would just be driving back and forth past the stadium."

  Besides the fact that he was a hometown boy, adding to the Athletics incentive to sign George and play him right away, from a publicity standpoint, was the fact  that George's father was a something of a sports entrepreneur in town, and later would become a founding father of the Kansas City Sports Commission, according to The Star.

  While George doesn't shy away from talking about his brief major league career, he can't help but wonder what might have been if he hadn't been thrown into the fire so early.

  “When I think back on it, if I had come in two or three years older, it might have made a big difference,” George told The Star. “I was a 16-year-old kid who didn’t look like he was 18 or 19. I was just a 16-year-old, moving along.”

  And yet, George has something to treasure, even if it lasted just over a week.

  "If you’ve played baseball at any level, you understand how difficult the sport is," Zeff wrote in the KCUR article. "We get lulled into a false sense watching today's big leaguers hit 95 mph fastballs. When you’ve stood in that box and faced a live pitcher, you know how difficult it is. And Alex George was doing it at 16 years of age."

Sources:

Alex George's major league debut: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1955/B09160KC11955.htm  

George biographical info: https://sabr.org/research/sweet-16-year-old-players-major-league-history, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki, Alex_George_(baseball), https://shawneemissionpost.com/2014/10/30/prairie-villages-alex-george-played-major-league-ball-kansas-city-athletics-16-year-old-33366/, https://www.kcur.org/sports/2014-10-24/kansas-city-is-baseball-crazy-now-but-you-shouldve-seen-1955, https://www.royalsreview.com/2018/7/18/17578792/the-ten-best-baseball-players-from-the-kansas-city-area and https://www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/article212804199.html

Career statistics: https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=george001ale  
Additional background came from various sources on the Retrosheet and Society for American Baseball Research's Biography Project and Games Project websites, as well as baseballreference.com.