Who doesn’t love a baseball fight?
Marion Mets Newsletter – Issue 30
The story behind two old newspaper photos of a July 1971 game between the Marion Mets and Johnson City Yankees (See below) reminds me of an incident in Major League Baseball a couple of years ago. You may remember it more for the radio announcer’s call, but the brief skirmish at second base was pretty exciting, too.
It happened in Cleveland, in August 2023, when the Guardians’ Jose Ramirez smacked a pitch down the right field line, hustled around first base and slid head-first into second for a double. Ramirez, unhappy with the way Chicago White Sox second baseman Tim Anderson applied his late tag – straight to Ramirez’s face! – stood up, pointed and yelled something at Anderson. The two opponents quickly put up their fists like they were Foreman and Frazier.
Anderson threw the first punch, a right jab that missed. Ramirez, who’s about 5’9”, ducked and threw a left that hit nothing but air. Then he rolled a right-hand hook straight into the 6’1” Anderson’s jaw.
The Chicago shortstop collapsed as if his legs suddenly had turned to jelly.
The Cleveland crowd went bonkers at the sight of the knockout.
“Down goes Anderson! Down goes Anderson!” Guardians’ radio announcer Tom Hamilton screamed, ala Howard Cosell, sitting ringside in Kingston, Jamaica, in January 1973. “They’re fighting! They’re swinging! Down goes Anderson! Down goes Anderson!”
Players from both teams sprinted onto the field and order was quickly restored. Anderson picked himself up from the dirt and walked around like he wanted another shot at Ramirez. But, it took little effort for his White Sox teammates to hold him back as Hamilton, in the press box above, roared over the airwaves, “Tim Anderson was on the wrong side of that punch.”
"He said he wanted to fight, and I had to defend myself," Ramirez said after the game.
If you haven’t seen it – first of all, where have you been? – go check it out on YouTube. The fight is fun, and Hamilton’s call may be the most entertaining thing you’ll hear all day… even if you’re like me and have watched the video 77 times.
We’re lucky to have technology that allows us see, hear and share these moments with one another with just a few finger taps on our phones.
The details behind this next story – the one involving the two photos – are lacking, nearly non-existent. There’s no video and no uber-enthusiastic radio announcer calling the blow-by-blow, if you will. We have only two pictures and a couple of paragraphs in a newspaper to rely on.
The first photograph appeared in the Johnson City Press on July 4, 1971, and the other was published the following day.
Let’s set the scene: The Marion Mets are playing on the road against the Yankees Johnson City, Tennessee. The Mets are winning, 7-5, but the Yanks are rallying in the bottom of the seventh inning.
Johnson City’s Stephen Nepa took off from first as one of his teammates – I’m not sure who – batted the ball into play. Unlike Cleveland’s Ramirez, Nepa went into second base standing and bumped into Marion second baseman James Kidder, who must have thought Napa’s approach was overly aggressive.
So Kidder, the New York Mets second-round draft choice out of San Antonio, Texas, months earlier, kicked Nepa, and the two began throwing punches at each other. The Press didn’t offer a play-by-play of the bout. There was no “Down goes Nepa!” moment.
Both benches cleared, just like in Cleveland. Players from each team broke up the fight and that was that.
Looking at the first photo – the one from July 4 – it just looks like a bunch of ballplayers standing around staring at each other. But, if you could hear their chatter, I’m guessing there’d be a lot of @#%s and &*$%s bandied about.
The situation appears to be controlled at this point, but look at the bat boy on the far right. Is he ready to rumble? How old is he? 10?
The second photo, as I mentioned, ran the following day, and it appears to show a scene seconds after the kicks and punches. You can see on the left that an umpire has Kidder wrapped in a bear hug. Just to their right, I’m pretty sure that’s Hiller, number forty-something, jawing with another umpire. Who knows what the manager said, but it was enough to get the skipper kicked out of the game.
Kidder was booted, too, for – you know – kicking a Yankee.
From there, the Mets lost their fight… and the lead. They committed three errors in the seventh round, I mean the seventh inning, and lost 9-7, despite an inside-the-park home run from Kidder.
There were 2,425 fans at the ballpark in Johnson City that night. If you were there and remember this 54-year-old dust-up, I’d love to hear from you, especially if you’re the bat boy.
That’s all for now. If you have a story to share about the Marion Mets, I’d love to talk with you. You can reach me at chadoz97@gmail.com. Also, if you see something I missed or simply got wrong, send me a note.
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