Freddie Fitzsimmons: A Baseball Life

By Peter J. De Kever

Freddie Fitzsimmons was among baseball's top pitchers during his 19-year career with the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers. Famed for his knuckleball, Fitz also had the reputation as the game's best fielding pitcher. Fitzsimmons was both a fierce competitor and one of the most admired players of baseball's Golden Age.
When discovered by Giants' manager John McGraw in 1925, Fitzsimmons became a household name to baseball fans around the country. A mainstay of the New York rotations of the 1920s and 1930s, Fitzsimmons pitched in the 1933 and 1936 World Series, where he suffered painful losses. Being traded to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1937 rejuvenated Fitzsimmons and brought him back to the World Series one last fateful time in 1941. When his playing days ended, Fitzsimmons managed the Philadelphia Phillies and later coached for the Giants and several other teams.
In Freddie Fitzsimmons: A Baseball Life, Peter J. De Kever brings to life Fitzsimmons's colorful character and most memorable games. Fitz's life in baseball spanned nearly half a century and brought him into contact with many of the game's luminaries, such as Babe Ruth, Bill Terry, Leo Durocher, and Willie Mays. A central player in the great 1941 pennant race, Fitzsimmons also witnessed Bobby Thomson's shot heard 'round the world a decade later. These and other stories figure prominently in this first biography of Freddie Fitzsimmons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491816035

Peter J. De Kever

Peter J. De Kever is the author of With Our Past and Past to Present, books of essays on the history of his hometown, Mishawaka, Indiana. He is an English teacher and coach at Penn High School, where his Spell Bowl and social studies teams have won 24 state championships.

Book preview

Contents

Introduction

1   Farm Boy

2   Ball Player

3   Big Leaguer

4   Ace Of The Staff

5   Close But No Pennant

6   Mcgraw’s Steadiest Workman

7   Knuckleball Artist, Chicken Farmer

8   Streaks, Slams, And A Shake-Up

9   They Can’t Beat Us

10   Still In The League

11   A Grand Season

12   Fitzsimmons Of Flatbush

13   I’ve Got Plenty Left

14   Indian Summer

15   Fat Freddie

16   Hard Luck

17   Extra Innings

18   Much Too Nice A Fellow For It To Happen To

19   Coach And Grandfather

20   Hometown Hero

Epilogue: Lost Landmarks

Acknowledgments

In memory of

Richard W. FitzSimmons

1917-2012

INTRODUCTION

On a bright, warm August morning in 2006, Dick FitzSimmons* greeted me at the door of his one-story home on tree-lined Victoria Street in Mishawaka, Indiana. The 89-year-old grandfather wore a polo shirt as white as his hair, and he spoke with a perpetual smile as he invited me in. We walked through the living room, where a baseball autographed by the New York Giants—a sacred relic from an era long past—rested atop the fireplace mantel. On the floor of the dining room were several large scrapbooks and photo albums preserving the history of the Fitzsimmons family. In the corner on the wall behind Dick were two framed pictures, one a drawing of his brother Fred and the other a photograph of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.

I was wondering who ever heard of my brother any more. It’s been a long time, Dick began with a hint of sadness in his voice.

Over the next two hours, I met Freddie Fitzsimmons, the Mishawaka native who starred for the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers baseball teams of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. A faithful brother and the last surviving Fitzsimmons sibling, Dick had kept alive memories of Fred, who died in 1979, and preserved the scrapbooks that he and his other brothers had assembled during Fitz’s playing and coaching career.

001_a_reigun.jpg

With great loyalty, Dick FitzSimmons, shown here in 2006, kept alive his brother Fred’s memory. (Peter J. De Kever)

Dick had good reason to suggest Mishawaka had forgotten his brother’s achievements. Since Fitz’s passing, a couple articles about his career had appeared in the local newspapers, but no streets or parks bore the name of the greatest athlete ever to hail from the Princess City, once its most famous citizen. Except for the community’s oldest residents or die-hard devotees of baseball’s Golden Era, most Mishawakans would have been hard-pressed to answer the question, Who was Freddie Fitzsimmons? Fitz’s anonymity and obscurity were typified by a Trivia Night competition held at the Mishawaka Fraternal Order of Police Hall in February 2007. A category of ten questions on famous local residents and historical figures failed to mention Fitzsimmons, indicating either the question writer was unaware of this ballplayer or believed no one else would know enough about Fred to get the question right.

Growing up in Mishawaka, I had heard about Freddie Fitzsimmons but knew little beyond the most basic information. He was given just 2 ½ lines in A Mishawaka Mosaic, a book of history essays created for the city’s sesquicentennial in 1983. Indiana’s Princess City, published in 1976, offered a more comprehensive history of Mishawaka’s first hundred years, but failed to mention Fitzsimmons at all, despite the fact that he had already become a prominent major leaguer—the first and, then, only from Mishawaka—by 1933. I, too, share in local historians’ culpability for past neglect of Fitzsimmons. My 2003 book With Our Past: Essays on the History of Mishawaka included essays on the city’s founder, a prominent black family, and a couple sports history pieces, but nowhere was the great Fred Fitzsimmons.

I was not ready yet.

With Our Past was a compilation of essays written mainly in the mid- to late 1990s, a time when I had less of an interest in baseball and its history. A mildly disillusioned fan of the Chicago major league teams, I was then just a moderate in my enthusiasm for baseball. I would watch Cubs or Sox games if they were on FOX Saturday Baseball, go to Chicago for a game at Wrigley or Comiskey perhaps once every other year, and then follow October baseball with greater attentiveness. I had enough appreciation of baseball history to make the obligatory pilgrimages to Cooperstown and Yankee Stadium in the early 2000s.

My interest in baseball and its glorious past began to grow in 2005, thanks to Ozzie Guillen, A.J. Pierzynski, Paul Konerko, and the rest of the Chicago White Sox, who brought home the 2005 World Series championship. My parents and I were fortunate to be in attendance at a cold, rainy U.S. Cellular Field for Game 1 of the World Series when the Sox beat Roger Clemans to begin their sweep of the Houston Astros.

Personally witnessing my one and only World Series game and then savoring the remarkable spectacle of a Chicago team winning the Fall Classic, increased my interest in baseball. Soon, in my visits to the library or local bookstores, I was drawn not so much to the history stacks, as before, but to the baseball books, where a whole other realm of history waited to be explored.

I continued writing about local history, particularly an essay I researched in 2004 and 2005 about nearly-forgotten Paul Fechner, a Mishawaka soldier who died in a Japanese P.O.W. camp in the Philippines in 1942. I felt great reverence for Fechner and his sacrifice and believed it was a sacred calling to do my small part to bring him back to life in the community’s memory. I hoped to include his story and other topics in a second volume of Mishawaka essays.

By the summer of 2006, I had finished some writing projects based on my experiences coaching high school academic teams and was beginning to mull over possibilities for my next local history research topic. For a week or two, I struggled to find something that interested me and that other local writers had not done much research on. Previous subjects had always seemed to compel me to write about them, so I did not want to force myself to pursue a topic just because I felt I had to.

Looking once more through my Mishawaka history files, I came across two articles about Fitzsimmons and reread them. What should have been obvious to me before was now suddenly clear: I needed to write about Freddie Fitzsimmons. It would be the perfect merging of my growing interest in baseball history and my long-standing devotion to Mishawaka’s past. I spent a couple hours that day searching baseball books in the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library and photocopying pages about Fitzsimmons. I remember the excitement of finding his name listed in an index, taking me to a sentence or a paragraph about the boy from Mishawaka who made it big. While Fitz’s hometown may have forgotten him, baseball historians knew who he was and gave him an occasional mention in their works. Admittedly, Fitzsimmons was more of a supporting actor than a leading man like Ruth, Gehrig, or DiMaggio, but he was still one of our own, a Mishawakan whose exploits had been worth mentioning in the annals of the national pastime. I came home with a small stack of material on Fitz and began to read and highlight the sources that afternoon. As I worked, I realized the importance of the date, July 28: Fred’s birthday.

I had been called. I was finally ready.

For the past seven years, the ghost of Freddie Fitzsimmons has led me across the country: from his birthplace in Tipton County, Indiana, to the sites of each of the major league ballparks he played in and many places in between. Often riding the same rails Fred and his teammates traveled eighty years earlier, my journeys brought me to the great cities he knew so well. In Fitz’s day, his train would pull into 30th Street Station or Back Bay Station, and he would anticipate arriving at the ballpark where he would ply his trade. My pilgrimages began instead at these cities’ libraries, where I spooled my way through miles of microfilm in search of any article that mentioned Fitzsimmons. Page by page, I came to know and admire Fred like a member of my extended family.

I have subtitled this book A Baseball Life because my focus is on Fitzsimmons’s baseball career, his performance as a pitcher, and his contributions as a teammate, manager, and coach. I do offer some perspectives on his family life, but discussing many details of Fitzsimmons’s personal relationships, his politics, or his idiosyncrasies is beyond the scope of the portrait I want to offer.

Who was Freddie Fitzsimmons?

Fitzsimmons was both a supreme competitor and an ideal teammate. Widely known for his confounding knuckleball and superb fielding, Fitz’s real value afield came from an outstanding will to win and physical toughness, which together offset his natural or age-related physical limitations. When Fitzsimmons took the mound, he was like a man possessed, driven to defeat his great mortal enemy: batters. Fred would sacrifice his body to knock down line drives, and he was determined to pitch past the point where he knew his arm would be twisted and swollen for days afterward. When not on the mound or at the plate, Fitzsimmons eagerly shared his expertise with other pitchers, coached first base, hit fungoes, or did anything else to support the team.

Mishawakans can be proud that their most famous son and greatest athlete was more than just a knuckleballer determined to win. Fred was also a man of good character who was both respected and well liked by all who knew him: teammates, opponents, sportswriters, and fans. None of the sources I found ever had a negative thing to say about Fred as a person. Away from baseball, he was just as admirable: devoted to his wife of more than fifty years, his beloved daughter, and the grandson to whom he was like a father.

The most exciting moments in my research were reading about games where Fitz memorably demonstrated his competitiveness and durability, such as pitching into extra innings, playing through the pain of injuries, facing down the Cardinals in the ’41 pennant chase, and twice coming agonizingly close to victories in the World Series.

Fitzsimmons was a remarkable player and an honorable person, but this book is not hero history that makes Fitz into something more than he actually was. I cannot claim that Fitzsimmons perfected the knuckleball, was the greatest pitcher of his era, or singlehandedly won the 1933 World Series for the Giants. Fitzsimmons is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, nor does this book make the case for his induction. Likewise, we have to keep in proper perspective the societal significance of any major league baseball player, even the greats enshrined in Cooperstown. At their best, ballplayers bring excitement to their fans, foster civic pride, and offer models of individual excellence and teamwork that inspire us to be more than we are. Nonetheless, baseball is just a game, after all. Any good physician, priest, or police officer will do far more for humanity in a year than a baseball player will do in his entire playing career. Those who value baseball, though, may concede this point but still revere the exploits of long-dead athletes who form a mythology as compelling as anything passed down from the ancient Greeks.

Doing this research, I have often thought that Fred’s biography should have been written 40 years ago. The people who best could have told this story were alive then: Fred, his wife and daughter, Leo Durocher, Bill Terry, and many others. Instead, most of the information for this book came from secondary sources, mainly newspaper articles from Fitzsimmons’s playing days and books by other researchers and biographers. It was my privilege to interview Fred’s brother and grandson, to know Fitz through their memories, but there were so many other voices I would have liked to include that have been stilled by the passage of time. The lively, enjoyable prose of that era’s sportswriters has survived, though, and I am pleased to retrieve their words from the microfilm for modern readers to enjoy. Reporters like John Drebinger and Harold Parrott are also noteworthy because they were a vital conduit for fans to know the teams and connect to the players, especially in baseball-savvy New York City.

Roger Kahn concludes his classic The Boys of Summer, a history of the Jackie Robinson-era Brooklyn Dodgers, by asking, Who will remember? This haunting question echoes Dick FitzSimmons’s fear that the passage of time had faded people’s memory of his brother. Freddie Fitzsimmons will never have a bronze plaque in Cooperstown, and neither the Giants nor Dodgers are likely to erect a statue in his honor. In the end, the most lasting monument to Fitz will be constructed in the minds and hearts of those who knew him and those who learn about him: Fred’s family, his fellow Mishawakans, and the nation of baseball fans. Freddie Fitzsimmons: A Baseball Life is part of this masonry of memory, an ongoing work to which each reader lends a welcome hand.

1

FARM BOY

Baseball has no single birthplace. In its earliest forms, the game was played in pastures, village commons, military encampments, and vacant lots in growing towns. The national pastime Americans recognize today, though, was invented in New York City and Brooklyn during the 1840s and 1850s. There, the sport evolved rules that were standardized enough for competitive leagues to form, and baseball, entwined with American society, began to expand with its own Manifest Destiny.

Although modern professional baseball originated in the nation’s largest cities, baseball players came from every corner of the country. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, images of skyscrapers and smokestacks excited the national spirit but were far from the world of most Americans, who still resided on farms or in small towns. They were the descendants of men and women who had tamed a continent or perhaps more recent immigrants pouring into the nation’s seaports. Urbanization, though, was the inevitable trend for both the American people and baseball. Countless ballplayers who reached the professional ranks experienced this familiar pattern of leaving the land or a small town for the big city, replete with its opportunities and dangers.

Like so many major leaguers of baseball’s Golden Age, Freddie Fitzsimmons was part of this migration. Descendants of patriots and pioneers, he and his family had deep roots in rural America.

The Fitzsimmons family traces its earliest American ancestors to eastern Virginia, near Richmond. The most prominent of these progenitors was Thomas Fitzsimmons, born in 1761 in Cumberland (later Powhatan) County. Fred’s great-great-great grandfather, Thomas fought in the American Revolution, enlisting in Colonel Richard Parker’s Virginia Regiment at age 15 with the rank of private. Fitzsimmons served in George Washington’s army through most of his five years of service and was involved in some of the most prominent events of the war. During Thomas’s first enlistment, he fought at White Plains, participated in Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware, and fought in several other battles from January through June 1777. Fitzsimmons signed a three-year re-enlistment in the fall of 1777 and endured the terrible privations of Valley Forge the following winter. He was wounded at Monmouth in June 1778 and fought in the Carolinas before a third enlistment in February 1781. Now with Colonel Tucker’s Virginia Regiment, Fitzsimmons saw action at Guilford Court House and was present at Yorktown when General Cornwallis was defeated, effectively ending the Revolution.

After the war, Thomas and his wife Polly began their family. Patrick Fitzsimmons, Fred’s great-great grandfather, was born in Virginia in 1792, shortly before the family joined the thousands migrating across the mountains into the new state of Kentucky. Thomas settled his family in Shelby County, where he and Polly remained until the fall of 1836, when they moved to Hendricks County, Indiana, to be near some of their children. Thomas died in 1840 and is buried in New Winchester.

Family documents show that Patrick Fitzsimmons owned a 202-acre farm in Shelby County, Kentucky, in 1835.

His son Richard was born in 1822 and married Martha Miles, who was born in 1826. They left their native Shelby County in 1850 and migrated first to Marion County, Indiana. After a short time in the Indianapolis area, the Fitzsimmons family moved forty miles north to Prairie Township, in the northwest corner of Tipton County, south of Kokomo. Their growing family of ten children included Fred’s grandfather, David Fitzsimmons, who was born in 1850.

Despite its proximity to Kokomo, today a city of 50,000 people, Prairie Township is still one of the most rural townships in Indiana, retaining much of the agricultural character that the first Fitzsimmons settlers would have known in the 1850s and that young Fred experienced in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Prairie Township was created in 1844 and during the 1850s experienced a large migration of residents, including the Fitzsimmons family. The population that decade grew from 722 to 1,247, and by the 1870s, 1,547 people resided in the township.

A history of Tipton County published in the late nineteenth century, describes the physical character of the land the Fitzsimmonses called home. G.N. Berry wrote, Nature, in her green mantle, is nowhere more lovely than in that portion of Tipton County set aside by survey as Prairie Township. Cozy farmhouses nestle in somber quietude amid green orchards which dot the landscape in every direction. Like much of the Tipton Till Plain that runs through central Indiana, Prairie Township is generally flat, but some undulations add attractive variety to the landscape. Before the first white settlers came, thick forests covered Prairie Township, as they did much of Indiana, and through the second half of the 1800s, the native woods of walnut, beech, oak, and elm were steadily cleared in favor of croplands and pastures. The black loamy soil of the township favored the agrarian pursuits of its residents.

Growing up in Tipton County, David Fitzsimmons met Hannah Carter, who was also born in 1850, and the couple married on Christmas Day, 1870. Their son Richard, Fred’s father, was born in 1873. David died six years later, and Hannah remarried.

Richard married Margaret Ellen Gordon on August 5, 1896, in Howard County. Ellen was three years younger than her husband. By 1900, Richard and Ellen were living on a 70-acre farm in parts of sections 32 and 33 of Prairie Township, half a mile south of the Howard-Tipton county line. They had one daughter, Mary Louise, who was born in 1898. The Fitzsimmons family owned their farm, which county land records indicate was comprised of two parcels: 30 acres at the southwest corner of the intersection of county roads 650N and 1000W and another 40 acres immediately across the road to the east.

Although every baseball reference work that lists player birthplaces says Frederick Landis Fitzsimmons was born in Mishawaka, that is not accurate. Fred most likely was born on the family farm in Prairie Township on July 28, 1901. No birth records for him exist in the Tipton County Health Department or in the Tipton newspaper, but family histories, his brother Dick, born in 1917 in Mishawaka, and his grandson Gregg Shelton, all affirm Fred’s birthplace as being the family farm. County archivists today say it was common for rural births not to be registered, and the 18-mile distance from the Fitzsimmons farm to the county seat may also suggest why the addition to the family was not entered into the public record.

004_a_reigun.jpg

Fred’s birthplace was most likely this farm in Tipton County, Indiana. He lived his first years here until the family moved to Illinois and later Mishawaka, Indiana. (Peter J. De Kever)

Howard and Marilyn Leisure today reside on the four-acre parcel that includes the oldest buildings in the immediate area. Howard Leisure asserts that his house dates back to the late nineteenth century and the nearby barn is perhaps fifty years older than that. Although documentation does not exist to confirm the Fitzsimmons family was living in this house in 1901, it is probable that they were. Thus, the white, two-story, wood-frame house at 6484 N. 1000 West is most likely Fred’s birthplace.

Tipton County histories offer additional details of what Prairie Township was like when young Freddie was toddling about the landscape and creating his first memories. The township lacked a railroad, telegraph line, or even a post office, and its only village was tiny Groomsville, located three miles directly south of the Fitzsimmons farm. When Prairie Township residents needed to go into town, they went a couple miles north instead, to Russiaville in Howard County.

Although the Prairie Township of Fred’s earliest years lacked the modern conveniences found in towns like Kokomo and Tipton, the land was fertile, and farming there was reasonably successful. Evidence of prosperity can be seen in Gretchen Kemp’s Tipton County and Her People, which describes the Prairie Township landscape surrounding the Fitzsimmons farm: large barns… , slatted corncribs, smoke houses, outside toilets, brooder and hen houses, spring houses, buggy sheds, well houses, and individual hog houses. Another county history refers to use of scientific farming methods and adequate drainage as attributes of the township’s agriculture.

With the benefit of hindsight, one might interpret that in a few small ways young Fred was already developing a connection to the game of baseball that would later provide his livelihood for over forty years.

Most directly, Fred was named in honor of Richard’s friend Frederick Landis, an attorney and the younger brother of future Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Of course, in 1901, no one could have known that either Fred Fitzsimmons or Kenesaw Mountain Landis would become prominently associated with major league baseball, but it is an interesting coincidence.

Frederick Landis was born in Seven Mile, Ohio, in 1872. About two years later, his family moved to Logansport, Indiana, 30 miles northwest of Tipton County. Landis earned a law degree from the University of Michigan in 1895 and began practicing law later that year in his adopted hometown. Exactly how Richard Fitzsimmons came to be friends with Fred Landis is lost to history. Landis was a prominent politician in the 1900s and 1910s, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1903-1907. After he was defeated for a third term, he returned to Logansport and stayed in the public eye as a speaker and writer. He was among the founders of the Progressive Party in 1912 and ran unsuccessfully on the party’s gubernatorial ticket that year. Landis sought the Republican nomination for governor in 1928, but lost. He was elected to Congress in 1934 but died shortly after the election.

His brother, Kenesaw Mountain—named after the Civil War battle where his surgeon father lost a leg—was born in Millville, Ohio, in 1866. Growing up in Logansport, Kenesaw was a cyclist and baseball player. In 1891, he graduated from Union College School of Law in Chicago, where he continued his legal career, and President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the federal bench in 1905. Judge Landis became the Baseball Commissioner after the infamous Black Sox scandal of 1919 and remained in that office during Fitzsimmons’s entire playing career in the major leagues.

Another connection between baseball and Fred’s youth in Prairie Township comes from major league pitcher Charles Babe Adams, who was born in 1882 near Groomsville. Kemp writes that when Babe Adams was growing up in Prairie Township he spent much time throwing clods at the birds and in the winter throwing snowballs.

In 1906, Adams made his major league debut with the St. Louis Cardinals and then spent the next 18 seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates. In the 1909 World Series against Detroit, he earned victories in all three games he pitched, including Game 7. Adams also pitched one inning of relief in Game 4 of the 1925 World Series in a losing effort against Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators. The Pirates won the Series, though, 4-3. Adams retired after the 1926 season with a career mark of 194-140.

After Adams had become famous in the World Series, perhaps Richard Fitzsimmons inspired young Fred’s baseball career with tales of their hometown hero’s achievements.

The tail-end of Adams’s career with the Pirates in 1925-26 overlapped Fitzsimmons’s first two seasons with the New York Giants. Collectively, Adams and Fitzsimmons would win 411 major league games and pitch in five different World Series—not bad for one sparsely populated rural Indiana township.

Dick FitzSimmons related that in the 1950s he visited the area in Prairie Township where his parents’ farm was. One man who lived nearby recalled Fred playing catch with Richard, a timeless ritual repeated by fathers and sons everywhere in America. Knowing that Fred would one day be a major league pitcher, though, gives greater significance and foreshadowing to a father and son throwing the ball back and forth. With the farmhouse, a barn, and gently rolling acres of corn or pasture, those games of catch between little Fred and his father form an appealing tableau. After a hard day of labor on the farm, Richard must have savored each throw and catch with his son.

The farm where Fred spent his first few years is easily recognizable today. The 40-acre section east of County Road 1000 W has been subdivided into five lots, each with a modern house. The 30 acres across the road, though, probably looks much as it did in 1901. Corn grows in this field, and to the south a small woods forms part of the boundary with the neighboring farm. Otherwise, the landscape in all directions is comprised of open fields and a few scattered houses. Half a mile west on narrowing 650 N is Prairieville Cemetery, where Richard and Martha Fitzsimmons, Fred’s grandfather David, and other members of the extended Fitzsimmons family are buried. Adjacent to the cemetery is the now-vacant Prairieville Christian Church, a brick structure built in 1877. The twenty-foot-high hilltop on which the cemetery and church are located is the highest point in the area and affords a view largely unchanged from when young Fred, his sister, and parents lived just down the road. This agrarian vista from another century is in stark contrast to the commercialized sprawl of Kokomo, a few miles north.

Within a few years after Fred’s birth in 1901, the Fitzsimmons family moved away from their Prairie Township farm. Although Tipton County farming in the early 1900s was generally successful, Richard and Ellen recognized that the opportunity to have a more prosperous life for their family would be greater elsewhere. Their 70-acre farm was smaller than average in Prairie Township, and the general trend throughout American agriculture has been consolidation, increasing the average number of acres required for a viable farm.

According to Dick FitzSimmons, his family moved to Illinois. I don’t know why they went to Illinois. It must have been that my other grandparents, the Gordon family, was going over there or was there, so they followed, he explained. Dick believed the family may have briefly lived in Gibson City, Illinois, a small town on the Illinois Central Railroad 120 miles directly west of Tipton County. There, Dick suggested his father may have taken up the shoemaking trade. Before coming to Mishawaka about 1906, the Fitzsimmons family lived in Rockford, 60 miles northwest of Chicago.

The Fitzsimmons family’s migration reflects that of millions of Americans during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Not only were waves of immigrants surging into the nation’s industrial cities, so, too, were many from America’s rural areas. Popular imagination often associates this urbanization and industrialization with the Chicago of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Booth Tarkington’s fictionalized Indianapolis of The Magnificent Ambersons. Smaller industrial cities like Rockford and Mishawaka were also magnets for rural dwellers and immigrants alike. These cities promised better paying jobs and amenities like electricity, telephones, shopping, and culture. Even 50-hour weeks of physical labor and drudgery in a factory may have seemed to many like a big improvement over farm life. The milestone 1920 census would show that for the first time more than half of all Americans lived in cities and towns.

Fred was about five years old when his family moved from Rockford to Mishawaka, a growing industrial center located ninety miles east of Chicago. Settled in 1833 by Alanson Hurd, an entrepreneur in the iron industry, Mishawaka had been a factory town from its inception. Hurd used local bog iron deposits for his St. Joseph Iron Works, and power was generated from a natural fall in the scenic St. Joseph River near the site he chose for his settlement. Numerous industries followed him to Mishawaka, most notably the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company, which produced shoes and boots; the Dodge Manufacturing Company, which specialized in power transmission equipment; and the Perkins Wind Mill Company. Near the turn of the century, each of these factories was reputed to be the largest of its kind in the world. Two major rail lines provided excellent connections to Chicago, Detroit, and New York, aiding Mishawaka industry by bringing in raw materials and transporting away finished goods for sale around the world.

Those railroads and abundant factory jobs also brought thousands of new residents to Mishawaka, where the 1900 population of 5,560 would double to 11,886 within ten years. Many of these new citizens were migrants from rural areas, like the Fitzsimmonses, but others were immigrants from Europe, particularly Belgium. Over a thousand Flemish-speaking Belgians came to Mishawaka between 1890-1914, and many found employment at the Ball Band woolen factory. Whether coming from northern Tipton County or East Flanders, these new Mishawakans sought—and usually found—a better life: good jobs, quality schools, and affordable homes.

Richard Fitzsimmons secured a job at the Beatty Felting Company, a manufacturer of women’s slippers, located on East Joseph Street (later Mishawaka Avenue) in what is today Central Park. City directories and school enumeration records show that, over the next several years, the Fitzsimmons family lived in a series of different houses on Battell, Lawrence, and Grove streets, just a few blocks northwest of the Beatty factory.

009_a_reigun.jpg

When the Fitzsimmons family came to Mishawaka, Richard began working for the Beatty Felting Company. A group of Beatty Felting’s workers is shown here. Fred is the child holding a glove near the right end of the front row. Richard is behind him. (Fitzsimmons Family)

This neighborhood west of Bridge Street (later North Main) and north of Joseph Street and the St. Joseph River was comprised of single-family houses, and many residents walked to their jobs at the nearby factories lining both banks of the river. A commercial district at the intersection of Bridge and Joseph offered banks and assorted stores. Downtown Mishawaka was half a mile to the south, accessible by walking or taking the streetcar that ran down West Joseph and over the concrete arches of a newly-built bridge.

Pursuing the job opportunities available in Mishawaka, Richard Fitzsimmons left Beatty Felting and joined the Mishawaka Police Department in February 1910. He was a police officer from 1910-1916 and from 1923 until his retirement in 1939. From 1926-1930, he served as assistant police chief.

The Fitzsimmons family continued to grow: Gordon was born in 1907, Bob in 1910, and the youngest child, Dick, in 1917. By 1915, the Fitzsimmonses had moved from the north side of town to East Fourth Street and resided there until making the short move to South Laurel Street. Around 1921, they moved to 524 West Grove Street, the home Richard and Ellen would occupy for decades.

010_a_reigun.jpg

Fred (right), the oldest of four brothers, posed here with brother Gordon, c. 1910. (Fitzsimmons Family)

When his family left Prairie Township, Fred was young enough that he would retain few memories of the farm where he was born. Instead, Mishawaka would be the primary place shaping his growth from boy to young man. Fitzsimmons’s identification with Mishawaka would be so complete that he would later tell baseball writers that it was both his hometown and his birthplace.

Mishawaka’s thriving industries, tree-lined neighborhoods, and the scenic St. Joseph River all formed the backdrop of young Fred’s boyhood and adolescence a century ago. Here, Fitzsimmons’s values and traits were influenced by family and friends, and he began playing the game that would determine his life’s direction.

2

BALL PLAYER

Baseball began flowing in Fred’s blood at an early age. His father had played ball as a boy and later managed the Beatty Felting Company’s team. An Arcadia (California) Tribune article from 1940 explained that Richard Doc Fitzsimmons encouraged Fred’s interest by teaching him the game’s fundamentals. When interviewed by the South Bend Tribune in 1933, the elder Fitzsimmons remembered baseball as his son’s first love. Young Fitz could usually be found at the neighborhood sandlot, where he and his friends played endless baseball games, like millions of other boys in that era. Richard fondly told the story of when, before Fred was a teenager, his mother purchased him a regular baseball cap, which he wore jauntily on the back of his head. The boy was so proud of the cap that he would not go to bed unless he was wearing it.

Dick FitzSimmons noted that the Fitzsimmons children learned discipline from their parents: My mother, she was actually the boss. When she couldn’t handle it, she called my father. It didn’t take him long to get things straightened out.

How exactly the young Fitzsimmons became a pitcher is unclear. The Arcadia Tribune article states that Fred wanted to be a first baseman but lacked the height for that position, so he switched to second base. Later, his father convinced him to become a pitcher. A 1941 magazine article gives a different version of events. Fred reminisced to reporter Jack O’Connell about his boyhood and the influences his parents had on his budding baseball career. Perhaps embellished with some sentimentality, it nonetheless provides the most detailed account of baseball’s role in young Fitz’s life.

Growing up, Fred admired Christy Mathewson, who won 373 games and pitched for the New York Giants from 1900-1916. According to O’Connell’s article, the boy expressed to his father the goal of becoming a major league pitcher like the great Matty. Richard, also a fan of Mathewson and the Giants, was eager to nurture his son’s aspirations and advised, Son, baseball comes about as close to an art as any game I know. To be a great artist in any field takes a lot of patience, study, and practice—especially practice. You’re young and strong. Keep your eye on the goal you want to reach; dig in and practice—practice every chance you get. Practice makes perfect.

In the following years, Fred worked to develop control, not just fastballs and curveballs. The rub was that when he tried to put speed on his curves, he had problems with control. He told O’Connell about an incident playing ball for his neighborhood team. It was the top of the ninth, and Fred was pitching with a 6-5 lead. After retiring the first two batters on grounders, the bases got loaded with a hit, a walk, and an error. To add to the predicament, the other team’s top hitter was up, and he had already belted two of Fred’s pitches for extra-base hits. With a full count, young Fitzsimmons thought about surprising the batter with an outside curve. He knew the hitter was vulnerable to that pitch, but Fred had not trusted his control enough that afternoon to throw one to this good hitter.

If I could just break one over the outside, I knew we’d have the game in the bag, Fitzsimmons later explained. I decided to stake everything on my ability to control just one curve. I took plenty of time, wound up, and let go. It was outside, all right, away outside, and also out of reach of my catcher. The guy saw it was going to be a wild pitch, so he swung at it and romped to first while two runs scored. Automatically, I covered the plate, and when the catcher recovered the ball and threw it to me, I was fit to be tied. I threw it as far as I could over the fence and out of the lot.

Fred’s father did not approve of that exhibition of temper and, later that evening, chastened the young pitcher, Son, there was no excuse for doing what you did out there this afternoon. It showed lack of self-control.

It showed lack of ball control, Fred countered, still frustrated by the pitch.

You’ll never be able to control a ball until you’re able to control your temper.

It doesn’t matter. I’m through trying to be a pitcher.

Oh! A quitter, eh?

I ain’t quittin’! I just can’t learn to control a curved ball, Fred responded.

You learned to control a fast one, his father reminded him.

Yeah, but it took a lot of practice.

Sure it did! And it’s going to take a lot of practice to control curves. Don’t think for a minute Matty became the great pitcher he is without practice. As I told you once before—

Oh, I know what you’re going to say, the son interrupted, but it’s no good for me. The copybook stuff may be all right in some cases, but it doesn’t work in mine.

Richard stood silently for a long while, then put his hands on his son’s shoulders, looked him directly in the eye, and said, Freddie, whether you ever become a great ballplayer is of little consequence. The important thing is, you are at a bad age to admit defeat. If you whip this—if you get over this one tough hurdle—it’ll do something to you that will be of everlasting benefit.

Not wanting to disappoint his father and be seen as a quitter, Fred promised that he would continue his efforts with the curveball or break his arm trying.

In the months to come, Fred tried to control his curve, but to no avail, and he again questioned whether he should quit. Here, Ellen Fitzsimmons enters the story as one evening Fred was sitting despondently by the kitchen stove.

What’s ailing you, son? she inquired. Out with it. What’s on your mind?

Dad thinks I have the makings of a good pitcher, her