The Iron Horse Strikes out 17 Ephs, and loses!
Did you know New York Yankees legend Lou Gehrig played one year of college baseball before joining the Bronx Bombers? During his year playing for Columbia University, he quickly established himself as one of the greatest two-way players in college baseball history – a fire-balling pitcher and a slugging first baseman.
On April 18, 1923, the future Hall of Famer took the mound against the Williams Ephs at South Field on the Columbia campus in New York City. Gehrig had a dominating fastball that day. He struck out every Eph batter at least once. His 17 strikeouts that day still stand as a Columbia record.
But that is not the end of the story. Williams kept battling. The Ephs won the game 5 to 1 behind a masterful, steady performance by a pitcher named Clement, timely hitting and – according to a New York Times article “a fast defensive game.” The Ephs bunched their hits into three innings, and were able to manufacture five runs.
Williams went 11-5 in 1923 – the best team in coach Jack Coombs’ four years as coach of the Ephs. (Jack Coombs was the uncle of future Williams Coach Bobby Coombs.)
Something else memorable happened that day. While the game was witnessed by only a handful of fans, one of those in attendances was Yankee scout Paul Krichell, who had been trailing Gehrig for some time. Krichell had observed Gehrig hit some of the longest home runs ever seen on various eastern campuses, including a 450-foot home run on April 28 at South Field, which landed at 116th Street and Broadway. Gehrig signed with the Yankees on April 30.
Larry Fuchs hits “longest homer at Weston Field“
Williams has had its share of terrific two-way players, but surely one of the very best was Larry Fuchs ’36. He was a star on an Eph squad that went 9-5-1 and shared the Little Three crown that year for coach Charlie Caldwell.
On May 30 in Williamstown, Fuchs (who went by the nickname Shanty) had one of the greatest two-way performances in Williams history. Fuchs pitched a complete game six-hitter against Amherst, and in the same game he walloped what was at the time thought to be the longest home run ever hit at Weston Field. The New York Times, the Hartford Courant and the Berkshire Eagle all carried stories on the game, and all of them mentioned Fuchs’ Ruthian blast. Williams won the game 10-3.
Another interesting note: May 30 was Memorial Day. In those days, Williams and Amherst always played on Memorial Day each year.
As for Larry Fuchs, that was one memorable day in an eventful life. After Williams he tried his hand at investment banking, but the winds of war were blowing, and he joined the Navy in 1940. He was promoted to Lt Commander on the USS Talladega, participating in the invasion of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was most proud of being the Officer of the Deck on the Talladega when it sailed into Tokyo Bay and past the battleship Missouri as the Japanese surrender was taking place ending WWII. He eventually settled in San Francisco, where he married and raised a family. He changed the family name from Fuchs to Fox to make spelling and pronunciation easier. Larry Fox was a CPA and a corporate comptroller until his retirement in 1984. He passed away in 1997, an Eph fan to the end. Every fall Sunday in those pre-internet days, he turned to the sports pages to see if Williams football had won the day before.
His grandson still has the game ball from May 30, 1936.
A Coakley Family Affair – 1984 and 1985
Probably hundreds of Williams baseball alums have had the great privilege to coach their kids in youth baseball. All of these lucky Ephs know the truth of the old adage “the hardest thing to do in youth sports is to coach your kid – and the second hardest is to play for your dad.” It takes a lot of love – and good communication – to do it well.
It is rare, however, when a father gets to coach his sons on the college level. Yet the Williams baseball program had exactly that happen during the 1984 and 1985 seasons. Here’s how:
At the end of the 1983 season, Coach Jim Briggs was asked by Williams President John Chandler to lead Williams’ major capital campaign and help open the Williams-Oxford program. The time commitment and travel required Briggs to step away from the baseball team temporarily. At the time, Bob Coakley Sr. was a storied high school coach in the area – coaching both basketball and baseball at Lee High School and later at Taconic High School in Pittsfield. He lived in nearby Lenox. He had been a very good college baseball player at Springfield College in his younger days, and he was asked by Williams to step in and lead the team as head coach in Briggs’ absence.
His sons Mike ‘85 and Rob ’86 were integral parts of those teams – Mike was a hard-hitting catcher and Rob was a slugging infielder. (Both were recently named to the Williams Baseball All-Decade team for the 80’s.) Now the boys had their father as the head coach.
“At the time, we did not give a lot of thought to it,” said John Hennigan, ace pitcher and captain of the ’84 team. “We just played ball. Coach Coakley was a respected leader and calm authority figure, and he helped all of us.”
Coach Coakley was ahead of his time with a strong emphasis on stretching and conditioning, which he learned from his basketball coaching days. He was also known as a task-master as a high school coach.
“Dad brought his Bobby Knight old-school mindset to the baseball team, which was a funny mix with some of the knuckleheads we had,” said Rob, who freely admits he was one of the knuckleheads.
While the results on the field in ’84 and ’85 weren’t what the Ephs had hoped for, players on those teams formed the core of the excellent 1986 team that set a then school record for wins in Briggs’ first year back at the helm.
“It’s not easy to replace a popular coach like Briggsy on an interim basis,” said Hennigan. “We needed someone to step in and keep the ship afloat, so to speak. Looking back on it now, Coach Coakley did a great job.”
Lilley makes the “greatest catch you never saw”
The 1986 Williams baseball team was coach Jim Briggs’ finest team, with a then-school record 19 wins. The squad was led by a class of dual-sport football-baseball athletes looking to end their college careers with a bang. But perhaps the biggest bang came in an April game at Tufts by center fielder Jeff Lilley ’86.
Jeff had nursed a love of baseball through an unusual childhood growing up in China as a son of a U.S. diplomat. Tracking down pretend fly balls thrown by his father had to suffice for baseball action through several years overseas, but when an opportunity to play centerfield at Williams presented itself, Jeff took on the challenge headlong. Lilley’s center-field coverage became legendary – “I used to dare them to hit it to me” – even when his bat struggled during his sophomore and junior seasons.
Fast forward to senior year with his classmate and star pitcher Kevin Morris ’86 nursing a 6-1 lead at Tufts but facing a two-on, one-out situation. The Jumbos batter laced a deep liner to center-left field that Lilley tracked diagonally as the warning track and wood fence approached. Diving head-first and with his glove hand stretched across his body in a full horizontal dive, Lilley backhanded the ball as his hat and head collided into the fence, snapping his neck back at a tough-to-look-at-angle. But the ball stayed in the glove as Lilley’s body lay on the track, and alert left-fielder Jim Duquette ’88 took the ball from Lilley’s glove and doubled off the trail runner to complete the improbable double play. Lilley made his way to the bench only to be told by Morris that a 6-1 lead didn’t deserve a life-threatening effort! Post-game, Coach Briggs presented the game ball (see below) to Lilley, who missed the next four games with neck pain, for his astonishing catch.
Side note – when the Tufts coach voted for D3 baseball All-Americans in 1988, he told Coach Briggs that Duquette, now playing center field, deserved his vote because “he made the greatest catch I have ever seen.” Duquette, benefitting from Lilley’s heroics, then made the team by one vote! (Duquette more than deserved the accolades – he hit .505 that season and set the Williams record for stolen bases.)
Lilley gives credit for the catch to the team’s antics during the Florida early season trip each year where the players would practice sliding catches, catches over walls and other would-be-highlight plays as a way to build team camaraderie. But ironically, even though Lilley says he used to count the steps it would take to reach the warning track at each field as a way to prepare, this catch at Tufts was the only diving catch he remembers making at Williams.
Those who were there that day – players and coaches on both teams, and a handful of fans – will never forget that play. Many of Lilley’s Eph teammates still speak about the miraculous catch to this day, and all of them swear that it was one of the finest defensive plays ever made in baseball’s long proud history.
Coombs, Steinbrenner watch as Ephs christen new field with sweep
In 1988, thanks to an alumni fundraising effort lead by Williams alum and Yankee owner George Steinbrenner ’52, Williams made several improvements at Weston Field. It upgraded its track, and moved the baseball field from Weston Field proper, where it sat astride the football field for more than 100 years, to a spot just west of the football field where it was nestled in a corner next to woods and a small creek that runs along Denison Park. The field looked out at the Taconic Golf Course, with the mountains just beyond.
That beautiful spot is where Coombs Field sat until 2004, when it moved to its current location on the northern end of campus.
On April 23, 1988 the Ephs welcomed Little Three rival Wesleyan to formally open Bobby Coombs Field on a cold, blustery spring day. Bobby Coombs, then 80 years old, threw out the first pitch, as Steinbrenner and a small band of hearty Williams rooters braved the cold to take in the historic christening of the new diamond. (See Berkshire Eagle photo of Steinbrenner from that weekend, below.) They were rewarded with a vintage performance by the home team. As the Eagle described:
It was show time for Williams baseball yesterday at the Ephs’ new Bobby Coombs Field. And the Ephmen responded by putting on a show.
Chris Conway and Mike Barbera each turned in complete game performances as the Ephmen swept a double-header from Little Three rival Wesleyan, 5-2 and 11-1.
Chris Pachus and Dalton’s Jim Duquette played leading roles as the Ephs raised their overall record to 11-8…
Conway did not strike out a batter while scattering six hits in the opener, while Pachus went 2-3 to lead the Ephs.
A double by Duquette and a subsequent triple by Pachus gave Williams a 1-0 lead in the first and the Ephs went up 4-0 with a three run third that included an RBI single by Brian Harwell.
In the nightcap, Duquette went 3-for-4 with a first inning triple, and Steve Holsten drove in four runs. Sean Logan added a single, double and two RBI for Williams…
Barbera tossed a four-hitter while walking two and striking out three.
That double-header sweep over its Little Three rival was the highlight of the season for the ’88 Ephs, as the team lost some close game down the stretch and finished 15-14
Ephs take Eastern Europe, win tournament in Prague
In June of 1990, just seven months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Williams coach Jim Briggs assembled a team of current players and recent alumni to play in Poland and Czechoslovakia along with a team from Haverford College. Like twentieth century barnstormers, this group traveled by bus throughout the two countries playing exhibition games and performing clinics to spread the joys of the American past-time to people who had rarely witnessed the game before. The trip culminated with an international tournament in Prague from June 20-24 with teams from the U.S., Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Germany.
On route to the tournament, the team offered a clinic in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia in the same complex where Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova honed their tennis skills. They also had the indelible, haunting experience of touring Auschwitz – quite the juxtaposition to the carefree game of baseball.
Williams and Haverford played games against each other and local teams in Poland. The games took place not on grass but on cinder soccer pitches, like cinder running tracks in the U.S. from the 1970s. Home plate was set in a corner of the soccer field with the length of the field the left field line and the width being the right field line. (Paul Reidy ‘92, one of the few lefty batters on the trip, enjoyed this alignment.) In one memorable moment, Todd Strieter ‘90 drove a gapper into right center and it caromed off the close fence toward center so Todd went for third. He slid head-first – on cinder. The crowd gave an audible gasp then erupted in applause at the courageous slide.
The competition was considerably stronger at the tournament in Prague, and games were played on grass. (See below for a photo of the field and crowd). In addition to Williams and Haverford, there was AS Roma from Italy, the Mannheim Amigos from Germany (which included several American service members), Athletes in Action from the U.S., the Czechoslovakian National Team and an all-star team of Division I and II players from Maryland, including several from the University of Maryland, then of the ACC.
Williams opened the tournament with hard throwing Jeremy Austin ’92 pitching a gem against the Maryland all-star team and pacing the Ephs to a 7-2 victory. Chris Pentz ’91 then kept the Czech National Team off balance with his plethora of off-speed pitches to allow the offense to earn the win. During this game, Pentz threw a low curve and got a generous strike call. The batter from the Czech team complained and the home plate ump’s right arm shot up twice, “strike two, strike three!” – a one pitch strikeout. Don’t mess with eastern European umps!
The Ephs lost to the Amigos but bounced back to defeat Haverford. This put the Ephs in the semi-finals vs Athletes in Action. Pentz allowed 13 hits but surrendered just two runs thanks to defensive gems by Mike Hyde ’91 in center, Laurin Laderoute ’92 at third, and John Whalen ’91 at first. The Ephs earned a spot in the finals and a rematch with the Maryland All-Stars that afternoon.
Coach Briggs called on Austin to face the tournament’s most intimidating team again in the afternoon finale. He threw another strong game and held the Div. I guys at bay for 8 2/3 innings while the bats scratched out enough offense for a 6-5 lead. With two outs in the ninth and runners on second and third, Austin had given all he could. Briggs called on Pentz to close the game.
With a crowd of a few thousand chanting “Will-lee-ums, Will-lee-ums”, (when not playing, a few Eph players had spent time walking through the crowd, playing catch with kids, and giving out candy and gum to spectators to gain favor with the fans) Pentz saved the game with a strikeout. (See photo below of the team after the final game. Coach Briggs is in the purple jacket.)
What the Ephs didn’t find out until later was that the batter who struck out for Maryland was the son of an Amherst player, Charlie Johnson, who played against coach Briggs when Briggs played for Williams. The Williams-Amherst rivalry even extends all the way to eastern Europe.