CEMETERY WINS ABOVE REPLACEMENT, Vol. 4

Maine, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Idaho

Welcome back to the goth baseball tour. We’re counting down (or up, if you like) to the state with the most buried baseball players, sorted by WARpC (WAR per Cemetery). Ultimately we’ll reach the one graveyard with more valuable dead baseball players than any other! For methodology and details, see the Introduction.

Today we head to Maine, New Hampshire, Minnesota & Idaho. Some of these obscure players are only getting digital ink because they happen to be buried in a state with no other good dead ballplayers. But… add in an old-time nickname, some statistical weirdness, a movie reference (or two), a 26-inning game, Robert Frost poetry, and a game show appearance… that’s good enough for our purposes. Let’s meet some more dead guys!

Maine is the home to mostly deadball (ha) era buried players. Of the 46 players entombed in Maine, 35 played before 1920 and just four played after World War II. Freddy “Flying Frenchman” Parent (36.1 WAR, St. Ignatius Cemetery, Sanford) tops Maine’s WAR list for his ten-year career, starting in 1901 with the St. Louis Perfectos. Reportedly only five-foot-five, Parent was a spark plug of an infielder and an ironman of his day, playing 412 consecutive games. When Parent died at age 97 in 1972, he was the last living baseballer to have played in the first World Series (1903).

Here’s a road trip for New Hampshire completionists. You can knock out 90% of the statewide 104.12 WARpC by following this route. We start with Jeff Tesreau (24.5 WAR, Pine Knoll Cemetery, Hanover), a hard-throwing, short-tempered spit-baller for the New York Giants from 1912 to 1918. He left the team after an argument with manager John McGraw and never returned to MLB. He coached the Dartmouth Big Green baseball team for twenty-seven years. 

Next, drive one hour southeast to find one of Tesreau’s college players, Robert “Red” Rolfe (29 WAR, Woodlawn Cemetery, Penacook). Rolfe played just nine full seasons, but luckily they were for the 1934-1942 New York Yankees, where he collected six pennants, five world series championships, and four all-star selections as their everyday third baseman. He managed the Detroit Tigers from 1949-1952, his team over-performing in his first two years, stumbling in his last two. Rolfe kept a personal journal, detailing virtually every inning of every game. These journals were published in 2006 as The View From the Dugout, edited by William M. Anderson. Reviews present the book as equally dry, factual, and fascinating, if only to the baseball-addled. I’m in.

From here, head further south to find Duffy Lewis (21.2 WAR, Holy Cross Cemetery, Londonderry). With the Red Sox’s Tris Speaker and Harry Hooper, Lewis was part of the deadball era’s greatest defensive outfields, and the only one of the three not in the Hall of Fame. From its opening in 1912 to the renovation in 1933, Fenway Park had a ten-foot slope that ran up to the twenty-five foot green monster in left field. Lewis mastered the incline so well, it was dubbed “Duffy’s Cliff”. 

Duffy Lewis on the Left; Ted Lewis on the Right.

It’s just forty-one more miles more to see baseball pioneer Ted Lewis (18.5 WAR, Durham Cemetery, Durham; no relation to Duffy). This Lewis pitched in six seasons for the Boston Beaneaters, but it being the 1890’s, that included 136 complete games out of 153 starts. After Lewis left baseball, he excelled as a university administrator and had a life-long friendship with poet Robert Frost, who read Lewis’ favorite poems by Tennyson and Walt Whitman at his memorial service.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, has one stop for grave seekers who love statistical oddities: Lakewood Cemetery. First up is Jimmy Williams (32.6 WAR), the all-time record holder for most triples as a rookie (27 in 1899) with the Pittsburgh. That rookie season was worth 6.9 WAR, a rookie Pirate record that still stands. Also here: Ossie Bluege (28.5 WAR), a good-glove third baseman from 1922 to 1939 for the Washington Senators and the scout who signed Harmon Killebrew (not a stat, but still interesting, and foreshadowing our next state). 

Russell “Buzz” Arlett (2.3 WAR) had one good season in 1931 as a 32-year-old rookie with the Phillies, but otherwise toiled in the minors. And I do mean toiled: nineteen seasons, accumulating 432 home runs as a switch hitter (assumed to be the MiLB all-time record), and pitched to a 3.39 ERA in almost 300 games. Arlett is in the Pacific Coast League Hall of Fame for his time with the Oakland Oaks and SABR named him the greatest minor league player of all-time.

Here also lies speedy center fielder Spencer Harris (-.8 WAR), the all-time minor league leader in hits (3,617), doubles (743), runs scored (2.287), and total bases (5,434), much of these stats compiled playing for the Minneapolis Millers. In 1948, at age 47 (his twenty-eighth year in baseball!), Harris batted .408 in 45 games for the Yakima Packers and the Marysville Braves. That’s TWO Bull Durham guys in ONE cemetery. Cool!

If that’s not enough baseball heaven for you, drive the hour south to pay homage to the most famous one-game, zero-at-bat player in history, Archibald “Doc” “Moonlight” Graham (0 WAR, Calvary Cemetery, Rochester). Yes, the guy from the book and movie. In 2005, on the one-hundredth anniversary of his single game career (and 30 years after his death), the Minnesota Twins held “Doc Graham Night” complete with a baseball card giveaway.

Idaho has two WAR hogs among the 17 buried players. Starting from Memorial Park stadium in Boise (home of the NW League Boise Hawks, AKA Boise Papas Fritas), drive 60 miles north for stop number one. The headline for Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew (60.3 WAR, Riverside Cemetery, Payette) is the 573 home-runs he hit, but visit that B-ref link for a page littered with black ink. His grave marker includes an image of him swinging a bat, an etching of the Twins’ Metropolitan Stadium, and a quote from his father, “We’re raising boys, not grass.”

Turn around and go back to Boise. There’s Larry Jackson (52 WAR, Dry Creek Cemetery, Boise), who pitched his way to four All-Star seasons between 1952 to 1968, with mediocre-to-bad Cardinals and Cubs teams, and is largely forgotten. “In his entire career, as best I can determine, Larry Jackson was never in the vicinity of a humorous anecdote,” wrote Bill James in 2001. He has pine trees on his grave marker.

One more because why not? If you’re in Spokane, WA, and want to commune with a pitcher from the longest game in MLB history, well, you’re in luck. Sort of. It’s 90 minutes to the gravesite of Leon “Caddy” Cadore (19.4 WAR, Pinecrest Memorial Park, Sandpoint, ID). Cadore pitched in ten seasons, starting in 1915. In 1920, he threw 254 innings, 10% of them in one game. On May 1, the Brooklyn Robins and Boston Braves played to a 26-inning 1-1 tie (called due to darkness). Both the Robins’ Cadore (96 batters faced, 5 walks, 7 strikeouts) and the Braves’ Joe Oeschger (90 batters faced, 4 walks, 7 strikeouts) pitched the whole game. Cadore would later say, “If he (manager Wilbert Robinson) had tried to take me out of the game, I think I would have strangled him.” Cadore appeared on the TV Show I’ve Got a Secret in 1955 with Ty Cobb and Johnny Vander Meer. Cadore was the only panelist not identified, garnering him $80 and a carton of Winston cigarettes.

Now that we’ve remember some (dead) guys for their one thing, what’s your one dumb statistic that would be emblazoned in some future newsletter/blog?

He could make 17 tiki drinks from memory. She crafted 271 emails that made people feel good about annual self-evaluations. Their record album alphabetizing was 94% accurate. Sixty-two percent of his weekends were spent (re)organizing the garage; it was quite comely. Thirty-three percent of their children stayed tattoo-free.

On the other hand, don’t think about it. 

It’s debilitating to consider how you might be remembered, while you’re living your life. Will it be this thing that I’m doing right now? How about now? How about… now?

We’ll never know. It’s not our job to dictate how we’re remembered. You just gotta keep livin’. I’m sorry I even posed the question.

Still. The motivator around here: game show appearance. I want those free smokes. Everything else is gravy.