Baseball Way Back: White Sox haven't had much luck in fights, but they held their own in 1957 brawl

When it comes to baseball fights, luck has rarely favored the Chicago White Sox.

Sox players are mainly remembered for being on the receiving end of blows. The lingering image is Robin Ventura getting pounded by Nolan Ryan. Threatening to rival that image is the recent toppling of Tim Anderson by Jose Ramirez.

On one intermittently rainy afternoon in 1957 at Comiskey Park, however, the Sox gave as good as they got - and then some - against their hated rivals from the Big Apple.

Fans attending the Thursday, June 13 game looked forward to seeing Billy Pierce, sporting a 10-2 record, and the first-place Sox face Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Moose Skowron and the second-place Yanks.

Instead, they were treated to an epic baseball brawl that erupted in the very first inning.

Pierce had a shaky start in the opening frame. Bobby Richardson led off with a single, but when Gil McDougald struck out, catcher Sherm Lollar caught Richardson attempting to steal.

Pierce wasn't completely off the hook. Mantle and Skowron reached on back-to-back singles, but once again Pierce wriggled out of trouble when Hank Bauer struck out.

The Sox mounted their own threat in their half of the frame. With one out, Nellie Fox walked and then advanced to second on a Minnie Minoso single. After Yankee starter Art Ditmar retired Lollar on a flyball, Larry Doby stepped up to the plate.

Doby, the American League's first Black player in 1947, who joined the Sox after the 1955 season when Cleveland traded him for Jim Busby and Chico Carrasquel, fouled off three pitches.

What happened next can be heard in the surviving radio broadcast over WCFL, with the Commander, Bob Elson, at the microphone.

"The pitch to Doby. Down he goes. A high fastball in close. Here's Fox moving up. And that's a wild pitch. A high fastball. And now Ditmar and Doby are going after each other here in Chicago. And Doby really belted him with a left hook. And Ditmar went down. And now there's a wild affair in Chicago. Boy, you should see this, as the umpires all get in there. Doby landed a left hook on Ditmar and dropped him."

News photographers captured the bench- and bullpen-clearing free-for-all in the next day's papers. You can see umpire Larry Napp trying to separate Doby and Ditmar in one picture. In another, you see Doby landing the punch with his left fist, as White Sox first baseman Walt Dropo and Yankees third baseman Billy Martin rush toward the combatants.

Subsequent photographs in the sequence show first baseman Skowron tackling Doby, Martin landing a blow to Doby's head, Sox coach Don Gutteridge and Yankees pitcher Ralph Terry pulling Martin out of the pile, Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford and Dropo wrestling on the baseline, and Dropo engaging in another battle with Enos (Country) Slaughter, who tries to duck out of the way as Dropo flails away at him with his fist.

As things simmered down, Martin charged at Doby. But as Doby moved to meet him, the umpires intervened.

The most famous photo from the fight, however, showed a grim-faced Slaughter with his cap on backward and his uniform shirt torn to reveal his chest.

For their part in the fight, Doby, Dropo, Martin and Slaughter were tossed from the game, which the Yankees won 4-3, cutting the Sox AL lead to four games.

Ditmar remained in the game - you can hear him roundly booed as he stepped up to the plate in the second inning.

Dave Philley, who first played with the Sox in the 1940s and was in his second tour of duty with the team, finished Doby's at-bat and struck out swinging, stranding Fox on third and Minoso on second, both having advanced on the wild pitch.

Watching the game on TV on the South Side of Chicago was 10-year-old Mike Donaghue, one of my fellow members of the group Sox Fans on Deck.

I spoke to him about the Go-Go Sox and specifically about the brawl.

Donaghue saw his first Sox game in 1952, when Sam Mele helped beat the Detroit Tigers with a home run.

During that time, he said, his idol was Minoso - he retreated to a bathroom and broke down crying when he learned that the Sox traded Minoso to Cleveland.

Recalling the fight, he said, "I remember distinctly Doby did not bring the bat with him towards the mound. He dropped the bat and then went to the mound and they exchanged blows, the two of them. And then, of course, the players went crazy, and the bullpens came in and there was just a general melee. And the thing I most remember, of course, was the indelible figure of Enos Slaughter walking off the field with his uniform shirt torn off of him by Walt Dropo from Moosup, Connecticut."

Later in life, Donaghue would pass through Paris, Texas, where Philley had served as a councilman.

"Philley was a pretty rugged character," he said. "He had these big Popeye forearms. "

He visited Philley at his modest home with a "classic Texas ballplayer's driveway," with a pickup truck and a Cadillac.

"I knock on the door, and his wife comes up. I said, 'Hi, my name is Mike Donaghue. I'm from Chicago. Is Dave Philley in?' She goes, 'Dave, here's somebody from Chicago.'"

He came out wearing a trucker's hat and a work shirt. "His hands were greasy. He was trying to fix this hand-pushed lawnmower. He was chewing tobacco and spitting tobacco juice. He had a little tin coffee cup that he was spitting into."

During their chat, he talked about playing in Chicago, telling Mike, "It was OK. Except that neighborhood, (with) all the (derogatory term for Italians)."

"I wanted to go, 'Wait a minute. The Italians lived in Little Italy on Taylor Street.' But I was a guest in his home. I didn't want to get in an argument with him."

When he brought up the fight with the Yankees, "He said, 'Oh, yeah.' And then he came up with an absolute classic. He said, 'I had my eye on that little pick-chicken Billy Martin. Because I knew that he could have thrown a sucker punch.'"

During the broadcast Elson called it "one of the best fights Chicago has had in years."

"I don't think it was more out of hand than what we saw (in the Anderson fight in Cleveland)," Donaghue said. "But it was somewhat similar."