Driving Birdie
Plus: Let's have a check on the weather
Marion Mets Newsletter – Issue 15
Finding photos like the one above is one of the many, many joys of this project. Unfortunately, though, I have yet to uncover many pics featuring the Marion Mets. I have a few copied, extremely grainy pictures from old newspapers, the occasional screen shot – like the one from the Nolan Ryan Netflix documentary – and then there is the series of black and white photos from the 1967 Life Magazine cover story about Birdie Tebbetts.
Titled, “A big leaguer in the boondocks,” – yep, that’s how the Life headline writer referred to Marion – the story is about Birdie (far left in the photo) leaving the Cleveland Indians organization a couple of years after surviving a heart attack to skipper the rookie league Marion Mets. The writer, David Wolf, stuck with Birdie for a few days, chronicling what it was like for the former major league catcher and manager to guide Marion’s Mets.
Wolf and his photographer followed Birdie around town, to Hungry Mother State Park, and on a road trip, which was the impetus for the inside-the-bus photo above. The caption doesn’t reveal much about the picture. “In the bus…” is all it says, but it conveys the idea that Birdie was sitting among his players, all of them wearing their hand-me-down New York Mets uniforms, as the bus rumbled to Covington or Bluefield or Salem for yet another series of midsummer-night Appalachian League games.
I believed the vague photo caption until I spoke with former Marion Mets catcher Jim McGregor last November.
“The funny thing was, Birdie didn’t take a bus to the games. We drove his car,” said McGregor, who played for Birdie on the 1967 Marion team. “But, the picture in Life Magazine shows Birdie in the front seat of the bus.”
When he said, with a laugh, “we drove his car,” the good-natured McGregor was referring to himself and his then teammate Tommy Moore, who later went on to pitch for the New York Mets, St. Louis Cardinals, Texas Rangers and Seattle Mariners during that team’s first year in the big leagues.
Birdie rode in the front passenger’s seat on those rides. In the back seat, sometimes, would be New York Mets traveling assistant coaches, McGregor explained. One was Monte Irvin, who played for the Newark Eagles and New York Giants. Another was former Detroit Tiger pitcher known as the Yankee killer, Frank Lary. Whitey Herzog, then the Mets director of player development, was along for some of those trips, too, said McGregor, who served as the grand marshal for Marion’s 2022 Christmas parade. “I got to know those guys a little bit, and that was fun.”
(By the way, there’s much more to this photo that I’ll get to in a later story.)
One last thing…
When I began writing the Marion Mets newsletter, I promised a new story every week.
Every. Single. Week!
Perhaps that was a bit too ambitious. It seemed like a fine idea at the time when I already had seven or eight stories in the can, ready to fire out to subscribers, one-by-one, on a weekly basis. But, when my well of already-completed stories ran dry, it all caught up with me, and my distribution slowed to one story about every two weeks… and sometimes a month would go by before I could crank out a story out.
I try to put a lot of research into this project because I want to reveal details and share those fascinating Marion Mets stories that have been long forgotten. However, digging through archived newspapers and seeking out phone numbers of former Marion players, managers, ball boys, groundskeepers, and whoever else was associated with those teams, can be uber time-consuming.
I may have overestimated, too, your appetite for these stories. Maybe one story a week is too much. So, I’ll slow things down a bit.
Also, I have additional writing projects that keep me busy and reduce my mental bandwidth. For the past 17 years, I’ve been writing, off and on, about sporting events in which weather – wind, rain, lighting, etc. – has played a considerable factor.
After a couple of years away from that project, I’ve decided to research and write a few more of those stories. If you’re interested, you can find my first two articles online. One is about an opening day rain delay at a major league ballpark with a retractable roof. “I thought we had a roof!” the team’s owner cried.
The second, just published today, focuses on a stampede at Yankee Stadium on May 19, 1929 that left a teenage girl and a 60-year old truck driver dead. More than 60 were injured, many of them were children. The cause? A mad rush toward bottlenecked exits when a sudden thunderstorm developed over the stadium.
That’s it for now. If you have an idea for a Marion Mets story… or a sports-weather story, you know where to find me: chadoz97@gmail.com.
