Telling the story of Jacksonville baseball
It was a project I had originally tasked myself for after the 2020 baseball season.
As a huge baseball fan, in particular of the game’s rich history, one of the most incredible things about working for the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp is constantly realizing how much happened right here in Northeast Florida — something as a non-native that I had no idea of until I started to slightly dig into said history for random projects throughout the year.
For example, when Larry Walker was elected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in January, I went through the Baseball-Reference page of every single Hall of Famer to figure out which ones had come through Jacksonville on their minor league journeys. The organization had an idea of some of them (Hank Aaron, Tom Seaver, Randy Johnson, Nolan Ryan, Phil Niekro, Hoyt Wilhelm). But we soon discovered that Al López was a catcher on the 1927 Jacksonville Tars. Meanwhile, in 1929 and 1930, the Tars were managed by Rube Marquard, who is in the Hall of Fame as a left-handed pitcher and came back to manage in the minor leagues following his 18-year playing career. Three decades later, another Hall of Famer, Bob Uecker, who was inducted into the broadcasters’ wing of the Hall of Fame by winning the 2003 Ford C. Frick Award, played catcher for the 1959 Jacksonville Braves.
In total, 11 Hall of Famers either played or managed in Jacksonville at some point during their careers (Aaron, Seaver, Johnson, Ryan, Niekro, Wilhem, López, Marquard, Uecker, Walker & Edgar Martinez). That’s an astounding number for any minor league club.
In addition to these fun projects of researching baseball (I really do have an awesome job), it seemed that whenever I read anything about the sport, Jacksonville would magically pop up. In The Kid, Ben Bradlee Jr.’s excellent biography of Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams, I learned that The Splendid Splinter actually trained as a U.S. Marine fighter pilot in Jacksonville. Williams learned to fly the F4U Corsair and set a base gunnery record for student pilots in the process. He also survived a serious plane crash in Jacksonville in an unpublicized landing carrier incident. In a nugget of far more levity, Williams was also “virtually forced” onto the Jacksonville base’s baseball team, on which he played with future Hall of Fame Detroit Tigers second baseman Charlie Gehringer.
Jacksonville even came up in Joe Posnanski’s extraordinary The Baseball 100, a project celebrating the top 100 players in baseball history on The Athletic (these essays alone make the subscription price worth it). It turns out Hall of Fame Negro Leagues shortstop John Henry “Pop” Lloyd was raised in or around Jacksonville by his grandmother after his father passed away when he was a baby. Posnanski also recalled roadtripping to Jacksonville in 1987 for a playoff series between the Expos and Charlotte Knights and seeing a young 6-foot-10 pitcher named Randy Johnson. A memorable quote from that piece on if people at the time thought The Big Unit would be an effective big-league pitcher: “Johnson? Hell no. That guy could throw a pitch from under the Eiffel Tower and not hit Paris.”
Basically, in much shorter terms, there is just so much incredible baseball history in our city. Unfortunately, it took a pandemic to allow myself the time to fully dig into the wealth of stories Jacksonville baseball offers. But while we social distance and wait for Opening Day 2020 and the beginning of the fourth season of the Jumbo Shrimp, I hope you’ll enjoy some looks in future posts about the magnificent wealth Jacksonville baseball offers. It has been a pleasure to learn about from a personal perspective, and I hope it will be just as fun to convey to you.
