Miles: Bilko book a big hit for baseball fans
Wrigley Field was quite the place in the 1950s: a championship, star players with star power and home runs flying out of a hitter-friendly ballpark.
Longtime Chicago Cubs fans might remember some of the names: Bob Anderson, Bob Speake, Elvin Tappe, Dick Drott, Jim Bolger.
But the biggest name of all - literally and figuratively - was Steve Bilko.
All were Cubs at some point, but the Wrigley Field we're talking about was Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, home of the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League.
In those days, the PCL was as close to being major league as one could get, enjoying an "open classification" status.
The 1956 Angels won the PCL championship, featuring several players who would or who had played for the Cubs in Chicago as the Angels had a working agreement with the Cubs. Field manager Bob Scheffing, who managed the '56 Angels, also was the Cubs manager from 1957-59, and general manager John Holland went on to fame (or infamy) as the man who sent Lou Brock from the Cubs to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1964.
The old Angels are the subject of one of the best sports books of 2014: "The Bilko Athletic Club: The Story of the 1956 Los Angeles Angels," by Gaylon H. White. The book, one you definitely should put on your holiday wish list, was an obvious labor of love for White, who grew up in L.A.
In today's parlance, Bilko would be known as a "Four-A" player: good enough to be a star in Triple-A but not quite good enough to stick in the major leagues.
Indeed, the 6-foot-1, 230-pound Bilko hit 313 home runs with a line of .312/.385/.560 in 13 minor-league seasons. In parts of 10 big-league seasons with six teams, he had a line of .249/.336/.444 with 76 homers. He died in 1978 at 49.
In the book, White writes not only about Bilko, but he offers interesting profiles of others, such as Gene Mauch, an infielder with the Angels who was considered a brilliant baseball mind despite a somewhat star-crossed career as a major-league manager.
As for the PCL, it provided players then with a decent living in pleasant places to play.
Still, as with so-called Four-A players today, questions surrounded Bilko throughout his career as to why he never cracked the big time in a big way, including with the Cubs, who then were a downtrodden team. Bilko played in 47 games for the Cubs in 1954.
The author addressed these issues in an email interview.
Q. Do you think Bilko could have been a successful major-league player, or was he, in today's terms, a Four-A guy?
A. George Freese, third baseman for the '56 Angels, said it best: "I still feel that if everybody had left him alone and let him play his own way in the majors, he would've made it. Instead, everyone tried to change him and make him look like a Mr. America in tights."
Bilko didn't have to worry about his weight in L.A. "Play between the lines," Bill Sweeney told him when he joined the Angels just before the '55 season. When Bob Scheffing replaced Sweeney a month into the '55 season, he told Bilko to focus on hitting, not his weight.
Contrast this to the Cardinals hassling Bilko to lose 40 pounds during spring training in 1950. "They put a rubber suit on him and they made that poor fellow run around and sweat and sweat and sweat," Joe Garagiola said. "And, then, they'd ask him to play nine innings after he was about dehydrated. He could hardly get the bat around And he was still hitting the ball 400 feet in right-center field."
Tommy Lasorda pitched for the Angels in '57 when Bilko slammed 56 homers. "If he were playing today, without question, you'd see a guy hitting 50-60 home runs," Lasorda said in 2003. "Easy."
Q. How do you think Cubs history might have fared if they had given Steve a chance?
A. Bilko's Triple Crown performance in 1956 inspired his teammates, mostly Cub castoffs, to career years. Gene Mauch batted a career-high .348. Jim Bolger batted in 147 runs hitting seventh in the lineup. Six players, including Mauch and Bolger, hit 20 or more homers. Four had 100 or more RBI. Angel players from Dave Hillman, a 21-game winner, to outfielders Bob Speake and Gale Wade, believe the Angels were better than the Cubs, Pirates and several other major-league teams.
Joe Gordon, manager of the San Francisco Seals in 1956, said if the Angels added two top-flight pitchers, they could finish second to the New York Yankees, world champions in 1956.
It's not far-fetched to say that if manager Bob Scheffing and VP John Holland had brought Bilko with them to Chicago in 1957, the Cubs could've finished in the first division instead of seventh with a 62-92 record.
Bilko's biggest regret is that he did not have a chance to prove at Chicago's Wrigley Field that what he did in L.A. was no fluke.
"When John Holland was going up to the Cubs, he told me and a lot of people, in front of my wife, that he was getting the job because what we did for him," Bilko said. "We'd made him a winner and stuff like that. Any chance he'd have at all to get me on his ballclub, he'd do so. But it never happened."
Q. I know a book idea stems from curiosity, and you had that about Steve Bilko. How much time did you spend interviewing primary sources and how much time did it require?
A. When I spent a day with Bilko at his home in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, Oct. 2, 1976, I was planning a book about players who were great in the minors and flops in the majors. With 76 homers in the majors, Bilko wasn't exactly a flop. But he didn't come close to meeting the high expectations the Cardinals and five other teams had for him in the majors.
When I got around to dusting off the idea in 2000, I started interviewing Bilko's teammates on the '56 Angels. I interviewed dozens of players in the 1970s - from Garagiola to Cub pitchers Jim Brosnan and Don Elston to ex-Card Rip Repulski and ex-Cub Chuck Tanner.
I wound up interviewing 26 members of the '56 Angels, including Bilko, and dozens of Coast League players, managers, umpires and fans - nearly 200 in total.
Combined with my childhood memories of growing up in L.A. in the 1950s, the interviews allowed me to create a tapestry of the times. I wanted to take the readers back to an era when fans kept score, players willingly signed score cards, and winning and losing really meant something to minor-league teams and players.
Q. Could those Angels and other good PCL teams have competed with major-league teams? It certainly seems that because of the working conditions, relatively good pay and cities with good weather, players were content to make a living in the PCL.
A. The PCL was granted open classification status in the early 1950s in an effort to stonewall the league's efforts to become a third major league. Of course, big-league owners like Walter O'Malley and Horace Stoneham had other ideas, moving the Dodgers and Giants to L.A. and San Francisco in 1958.
Instead of expanding like it did in the 1960s, the majors would've been better served adding the Coast League, much as the NFL did when it absorbed the American Football League. The new big-league teams would've been more competitive quicker than through traditional expansion.
In many ways, the PCL was more big league than the majors. Teams traveled by air while they were still traveling by train in the majors. Wrigley Field in L.A., Seals Stadium in San Francisco and Sicks Stadium in Seattle were better than several major-league parks.
The mild climate in PCL cities allowed veterans to play longer and make more money. If you weren't a star in the majors, you made the major-league minimum. In 1956, that was $7,500.
Bilko made double that amount in '56. Combined with another $15,000 in endorsements, he made $30,000 - almost as much as the $35,000 salary the Yankees paid Mickey Mantle in '56.
When Bilko returned to the majors with the Redlegs in 1958, he took a pay cut. In 1961 he signed with the American League for $12,500 - $2,500 less than the '56 Angels paid him.
Today, Bilko would be just another wide body in the majors, not the fat guy managers loved to nag.