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FeaturingUNION-MADE WORK CLOTHESCUT-RATE PRICESN N O U N C I N OUR NEWDEPARTMENTYear-RoundINDUSTRIAIUNIFORMS• Pants • Shirts• Caps • JacketsWhipcord, Twill, Herringbone fabric*. Large selection of colors.Visit OurCut-Rate Tobacco DepartmentFor Your Popular Smokes48 East Market St.8 Doom From City HallSwoyerville's Packy RogersTells His VersionEL FeudPacky Rogers, who has bowed out of the - Eastern League baseball picture as manager of the Elmira club, took time last week to present his story of the beanmg'* incident which attracted considerable attention following a Pioneers’ tilt with WilliamsportJnSt S CftttULHere is Packy’s explanation of the Incident:I guess the thing T regret most about the 1948 baseball season was the beaning incident against Williamsport.The “beaning incident” was not given as much attention in Elmira as In Williamsport andlater a Stuckmeyer pitch ag*in connected with the man at the plate. This time Bruce Blanchard, later to become the league’8 leading hitter, w'as pegged in the back.v. - . u i Nobody said anything publicly bcranton, the latter because It , ^ Deflautels williams-v as used by a sports writer as another source of broadside material to be flred at the league's president.What happened at Dunn Field that day is this:The Pioneers were, as usual, trailing Williamsport along about the sixth inning when a Roland Stuckmeyer pitch conked the Tigers’ Ken Humphrey on the back of the head. Hurpphrey was removed from the game but not seriously hurt. One batterMORRISMEN’S SHOP91 South Main St., Wiikes-Rarreport manager, got home. He favored the Billtown papers with a blast at my “vicious methods.” “A boy might have been killed by one of those d e 1 i b e ra t e pitches,” said Desautels in an essentially correct statement; for actually a baseball has been the means of more than one death.T refused to deny that I had instructed Stuckmeyer to “throw at the batters.”In the heat of the moment I failed to qualify my statement of: “Sure I told Stuck to throw at ’em!” My acceptance of blame was plastered around the circuit and one writer went so far as to urge my banishment from baseball.Wasn’t Thinking FastI wasn’t thinking very fast on my feet or I would have realized the damage my reluctance to qualify the statement caused. Right now, for example, I believe that episode has hurt me in getting another managing job. After all some of these young players represent an investment of $50,000 and the clubs don’t want those boys hurt.But le£’s set the record straight now.Everybody on the field thAt day heard me yell “throw it at ’em” Stuckmeyer. But, you near that a lot—from Desautels and all the restWhat I really wanted Stuck to do was knock ’em back!If you’ll recall we were in an unusually bad slump, even for us. *and I was convinced that one reason our pitchers were getting beat was that they didn’t have the batters unsettled at the plate. The other team was getting a footholdMy object—and Stuck meyer’s— was to scare the batter, not to hit him. I had stressed that point to my pitchers the day be-fore. - ' *'4I consider It a part of baseball strategy to pitch ’tight’ to some batters and that's what Stuck was doing, or trying to do. If he’d really gone wild and been trying to bean Humphrey, Stuck would have been firing his fast ball, as it was he hit Humphrey with a half speed curve.I got mad myself a few days later when I saw those Willams-port stories about it. The worst part, was Desautels saying that the Pioneer players didn’t like me. Let me tell you that really burned up my ball players and if you'll recall we gave Williamsport a lot more trouble after that. We beat Kretlow three straight times aftd almost cost them a playoff spot by taking that doubleheader on the last Sunday of the season. That was the answer my players had to his “The Pioneers don’t like Packy” statement.Thinks It Hurt HimOf course Desautels and I are good friends now. But I can’t help feeling that my baseball future might have been hurt by his statements and those of some sports writers who, incidentally, never stopped to ask my side of the story before they blasted But as T said at the start, it is also my fault for no* explaining more about the situation at the time and I regret it.T would never tell a pitcher to hit a batter and mean it literally.
Newspaper Details
Wilkes Barre Sunday Independent
Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, US
Sun, Jan 16, 1949
Page 5
Full Page
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MO, USA 18 Jul 2019
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Wilkes Barre Sunday Independent
