Baseball Beginnings

Posted By John Klima on July 6, 2009

By John Klima 

The letters inevitably arrive in April. They come from different points across America, but all ask the same thing.

“Dear Paul: You were the first $100,000 bonus baby,” one started, as if Paul Pettit had forgotten. It is a classic fan letter to a baseball player, a sugarcoated attempt at knowledge disguised, as a friendly ruse for a signature. “I am sorry that you didn’t play in the majors longer, but it still means something to have been there. If you have a photo to autograph for me, I would like it. Thank you.”

They all end with the same question, and sometimes, the letter writers even say please. The letters always find their way into Pettit’s garage at his home in Hemet, the place where the walls have been covered with photographs from his career, but this is no shrine. You can find his photos by his workbench, where his tools are neatly organized, next to the dusty set of golf clubs. Time and bad knees have caught up to him, he said, and he stopped playing a few years ago. He is 76 now, and on the kitchen table is a pillbox with his daily medications.

He takes the time to accommodate each letter, but sometimes it strikes him as funny that someone wants the signature of a pitcher who won one lousy game in the major leagues 53 years ago. It is as if they are waiting on a young man’s promise as a pitcher long since lost.

“The only thing I can think of,” he said with a laugh as he walked past images of former teammates, some now gone, the happy faces of ballplayers confined to black and white images, “Is that someone thinks it’s worth something.”

There is tremendous irony in his statement. Once, his signature was worth more than any other high school player in the history of the game. In 1950, he made a deal that shook the baseball industry and served as a precursor to the way modern athletes are bought and sold.

For years, he autographed copies of the photo of him wearing his Narbonne High uniform in 1948. In that photo, he stands tall and proud. The photo is taken from an upward angle, so the young man looks poised and polished. He looks strong and powerful, unaware what $100,000 in 1949 would mean for the rest of his life.

“That’s my favorite picture,” he said. “I was just a young kid who happened to be able to throw a baseball.”

He happened to be able to throw a baseball so well that he was the first $100,000 bonus player. His legacy is not as a pitcher with one major league win, but as a cautionary tale.

Here, days after major league baseball’s annual amateur draft, when many promising baseball players expect the future to unfold as planned, Pettit is a living reminder that no matter how certain one’s career looks, there are no guarantees.

His wife, Shirley, walked in. Pettit stopped to look at a framed mural of Forbes Field, a montage made up of all the names of the Pittsburgh Pirates who played there. Pettit can never remember where to find his name, but Shirley, his wife since 1950, knows exactly where to look.

She pointed at the front column, and there is Pettit’s name. He smiled. She always knows where to find him.

If you listen closely, the stories are all here. There is a photo of George Pettit, a native Englishman who arrived in Los Angeles in 1909 with a love of soccer and not much else. He quit school and never became a rich man, but he always found a paycheck and a soccer game. He spent 20 years working as a milkman, and when he was 35, he married a nurse from Philadelphia named Valerie.

The couple had a daughter, Valerie, followed by a son, George William Paul, who was born at the height of the Depression, on Nov. 29, 1931. “I got Paul,” he said, “Because my mother thought it was a lucky name.”

His father worked in the alphabet soup programs, gaining employment in the Works Progress Administration as a landscaper at Fort McArthur in San Pedro. In 1941, the family moved to the low- rent Harbor Hills housing project in Lomita where, by 1950, no family was allowed to have an annual income of more than $3,000.

Growing up in Lomita made Pettit cherish what little his family had. George’s only son understood the value of modesty, a trait that would serve him well in a career he did not predict.

“We weren’t dirt poor,” Pettit remembered, standing in front of his Mercedes. “But we didn’t have much extra to spend, either.”

Occasionally, Pettit recalled, there was just enough to walk to the movie theater. Sometimes, if they were lucky, they would get to watch “Flash Gordon” serials, directed by Frederick Stephani, a wonder kid with a flair for the future.

Pettit has only one photo of Stephani because the man is a mystery. Ambitious and clever, Stephani arrived in Hollywood in the early 1930s from the University of Bonn and Heidelberg Film School, one of a generation of European filmmakers who recognized Germany was changing.

Neither Pettit nor Stephani could have foreseen that, in 1950, they would make a deal that would begin to change the way baseball does business. Pettit, in unassuming fashion, signed an agreement that made professional baseball players question their own value and the right to determine their own careers. Stephani, Baseball Beginnings believes, became the first amateur player agent in baseball history. It led leading baseball executives, such as Branch Rickey, to urge owners to accept an amateur draft, which was instated in 1965, partially in an effort to curb bonus payments, a decision that had the opposite effect on signing bonuses.

The deal angered baseball owners, who feared losing control of players and resented negotiating with agents.

Baseball is a business of unspoken truths, and in judging the trajectory of Pettit’s own career, it is difficult not to speculate that he was blackballed nearly 10 years later when, having reinvented himself as a power-hitting first baseman, he nearly hit his way back to the big leagues. But instead of a stirring end to a struggle, Pettit was left to languish in the minor leagues.

The decision he made as an 18-year-old high school pitcher was one of the first signs that a new era was coming. He did this as a teenager, not to challenge authority, but because he recognized the rare opportunity to help his family escape from life in a housing project.

Instead, Pettit would only be remembered as the pitcher who turned in one major league victory for $100,000, but his story is about more than a signature. Like finding his name hidden within a mural of a long-gone ballpark, Pettit’s truth lies somewhere in a black-and-white past.

The Lefty from Lomita

His fastball came out of a folktale.

“There hasn’t been a schoolboy pitcher around like him for a long time,” Branch Rickey told the Los Angeles Times. “He’s the Bob Feller type, definitely, and maybe by this time next year a lot of people will know it.”

High school hitters rarely stood a chance. Pettit threw a no- hitter against San Pedro as a Narbonne sophomore in 1947, his first of six no-hitters in three years. He went 16-0 for a semi-pro team in Hermosa Beach. In the summer of 1949, he threw three consecutive no-hitters: one in high school and two in American Legion, racking up at least 18 strikeouts in each game.

Pettit’s reputation was sealed when, as a senior in 1949, he took the mound against Banning High and pitched a game he never forgot. “I had that little extra fastball,” he says. “Confidence was abounding.”

Pettit gave up four hits and struck out 27 batters and won the game, 2-1, in 12 innings. It was the most strikeouts in a California high school game since Walter Johnson in 1905.

The late Howie Haak, then a young Brooklyn Dodger scout, was stunned.

“I saw him at his best and never saw his equal,” Haak told Pittsburgh writer Les Biederman in 1954. “He had a major league curve in high school and just blazed his fastball by all the batters. If the other team hit a ball in the air, it was a big event.”

Pettit was the best pitcher from Lomita since the Dodgers signed Erv Palica out of Narbonne as a 16-year-old sophomore in 1945. He had been sent to Ebbets Field courtesy of scout Tom Downey.

You couldn’t miss Downey, who barreled into town driving his two- door, baby blue Cadillac. Former players claim he kept a liquor cabinet in the trunk. When the Dodgers played in the 1947 World Series, Downey had originally signed four of their starters. In 1944, Downey had signed a promising multi-sport athlete from Compton, Duke Snider.

Downey was a former Mexican League pitcher with a reputation for making deals under the table, according to players who knew him. Downey centered his attention on finding a way to bring a wad of Pirate owner Frank McKinney’s Indianapolis bankroll to Pettit’s pocket.

“Downey was real good,” Pettit says. “Real supportive. He just thought I had all the potential in the world.”

For a scout, discovering a hard-throwing, 6-foot-2, 205-pound left-hander is like finding an oasis in the desert and having to pay for a drink.

“I knew my value,” Pettit said. “I was going to sign for at least $90,000.”

Yet in the back of Pettit’s mind there were terrible reservations. He had thrown so many innings that he feared the worst. George Pettit had learned how to compile his son’s pitching statistics and tallied 945 strikeouts in 545 innings over three years, an average of 181 innings per season as a teenager.

Pettit also kept a secret. He had injured his elbow when he landed awkwardly in a basketball game. He had the opportunity to make more money in one moment than his parents had made in their entire lives. It meant no more menial jobs for George, who was then working as a night watchman. Some days, his mind felt as tired as his arm. He didn’t feel young anymore. He was only 18.

“I think he was under pressure in those days,” former player and manager George Genovese said. “All eyes were always on him. In a way, it was like the kiss of death, getting all that money.”

Categories: Baseball Beginnings Exclusives
Tags: Deal of the Century, Paul Pettit