The Main Event
- August 1, 1950 – The Phillies lose star pitcher Curt Simmons to military duty — the first major leaguer called up for the Korean War when his Pennsylvania National Guard unit was activated.
Curtis Thomas Simmons was born May 19, 1929, in the tiny village of Egypt, Pennsylvania, and by the time he graduated high school in 1947 he was the most talked-about pitching prospect in the country. At Whitehall High School he threw two no-hitters, three one-hitters, and once struck out 20 of the 21 batters he faced. He also hit .465 that senior season. Nearly every big-league club wanted him, and it came down to the Phillies, Detroit, and Boston. His father let the Phillies match Boston’s $60,000 offer, and Simmons signed for $65,000 — one of the largest bonuses given to that point, even though the New York Giants had dangled $125,000 before he’d committed to the Phillies.
Because bonus babies of that era could spend only one year in the minors, Simmons was pitching for the Phillies by September 1947, at 18 years old. In his first major-league start, on the last day of that season, he shut down a Giants lineup built around home-run king Johnny Mize, walking six but allowing just one run in a 3-1 win. It was a dazzling first impression, but the next two seasons humbled him — he went 7-12 in 1948 and 4-10 in 1949 while a pitching coach fiddled with his delivery.
Everything came together in 1950. Simmons and fellow 21-year-old Robin Roberts anchored a young Phillies team the press nicknamed the “Whiz Kids,” and by late August both pitchers had 17 wins as Philadelphia built a comfortable lead in the National League. Then, on September 10, 1950, Simmons’s Pennsylvania National Guard unit was activated for the Korean War. He and other Phillies players had joined the Guard in 1948 at owner Bob Carpenter‘s suggestion, mainly as a hedge against the peacetime draft — nobody expected it to matter. Simmons pitched on short rest that Saturday, won, and was on a train to basic training the next day.
What followed was jarring. One afternoon he was pitching in front of 30,000 fans at Shibe Park; within days he was on his hands and knees scrubbing a barracks latrine at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, on rationed food, with only two telephones and two radios for the whole camp. The Phillies limped to the pennant anyway, clinching on the final day of the season on Dick Sisler‘s tenth-inning home run in Brooklyn — a moment Simmons learned about only because a stranger came running out of a barracks yelling the news. The Phillies’ traveling secretary had spent weeks promising Simmons the club was working to get him back for the World Series. It nearly happened: an Army general offered him a 10-day furlough late in September, but by the time it came through, the Phillies had already replaced him on their World Series roster with journeyman Jocko Thompson. Commissioner Happy Chandler ruled Simmons ineligible to pitch even though he was in uniform for part of the Series, which the Yankees swept in four games, three of them by a single run. Simmons finished 1950 at 17-8 with a 3.40 ERA — and never got to pitch in it.
He spent all of 1951 on active duty as well, and the Phillies collapsed to fifth place without him. He returned to the mound in 1952 with no spring training and still went 14-8, started the All-Star Game, and led the National League with six shutouts. Over the rest of the decade he was a reliable second act to Roberts, winning between 14 and 16 games most seasons even as his sidearm, across-the-body motion wore on his arm. In June 1953, just three weeks after throwing a one-hit shutout in which he retired 27 straight batters, Simmons sliced off part of his left big toe mowing his lawn — an injury he always insisted was “exaggerated” as a factor in his season. By 1958, arm trouble had caught up with him for good, and the Phillies, sliding toward the cellar, released him early in the 1960 season. He found out from his roommate, Robin Roberts, while the team was in San Francisco.
The St. Louis Cardinals signed him for $25,000, and at 31 Simmons reinvented himself. “I’m a pitcher now, no longer a thrower,” he said. He won National League Comeback Player of the Year honors in 1961, and in 1962 beat the Los Angeles Dodgers twice in the season’s final ten days, helping force a pennant playoff with the Giants. In 1964, the year the Cardinals overtook a collapsing Phillies team down the stretch, Simmons went 18-9 and, at 35, finally made a World Series roster — 14 years after missing his first chance. He pitched well in Games Three and Six against the Yankees, and the Cardinals won the championship in seven games. Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, who hit six of his 755 home runs off Simmons, called him one of the toughest lefties he faced: “It was that motion of his. He would turn his body, give me a view of his backside… then it would come floating in like plastic.”
Simmons pitched two more seasons with the Cardinals, then finished out his career with brief stints for the Chicago Cubs and California Angels, retiring after the 1967 season with a career record of 193-183 and a 3.54 ERA over 20 years. He spent his retirement running the Limekiln Golf Club near Ambler, Pennsylvania, a course he co-owned with his old friend Roberts. He was inducted into the Philadelphia Baseball Wall of Fame in 1993 and the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame in 2011. Simmons died on December 13, 2022, at age 93, the last surviving member of the 1950 Whiz Kids — a career forever marked by the pennant he helped win but the World Series he was never allowed to play.
Philadelphia Baseball Events for August 1
- August 1, 1896 – Purchased Nap Lajoie from Fall River (MA) for $1,500.
- August 1, 1929 – The A’s beat the Tigers 7-4 at Shibe Park to improve to 73-26, the best record in baseball on their way to the AL pennant and a World Series title.
- August 1, 1953 – Robin Roberts throws a complete game in a 3-1 win over Chicago, for his 200th career win.
- August 1, 1966 – Dick Allen‘s inside-the-park homer beats the Astros in the 10th; Houston CF Jim Wynn breaks an arm crashing into the wall on the play.
- August 1, 1972 – The Phillies lose an 18-inning marathon to the Mets in a Banner Day doubleheader; in the nightcap, Cleon Jones ends Steve Carlton‘s 30-inning scoreless streak.
- August 1, 1984 – Mike Schmidt, Garry Maddox, and Al Holland appear as construction workers on the soap opera “One Life to Live”.
- August 1, 1996 – Scott Rolen makes his MLB debut and gets his first hit, a double.
- August 1, 2004 – Randy Wolf retires the Cubs on three pitches despite allowing a leadoff bunt single.
- August 1, 2011 – Released Danys Baez.
- August 1, 2023 – Traded Bailey Falter to Pittsburgh for Rodolfo Castro; traded Hao-Yu Lee to Detroit for Michael Lorenzen.
Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for August 1
- Harry Croft (born 1875) – A part-time infielder/outfielder, he had a brief seven-game stint with the Phillies in 1899, sandwiched between stops in Chicago and Louisville during his three-year big-league career.
- Ray Hamrick (born 1921) – Won the Phillies’ starting shortstop job out of spring training in 1943, but after 74 games he left for military service and never played in the majors again once he returned.
- Pete Mackanin (born 1951) – A Chicago-area infielder who briefly played for the Phillies mid-career, he came back decades later as bench coach, then managed the club from 2015–2017 before moving into a front-office advisory role.
- Greg Gross (born 1952) – Spent 10 of his 17 big-league seasons with the Phillies (1979–1988) as an elite pinch-hitter, setting the franchise pinch-hit record and delivering the pivotal bunt in Game 5 of the 1980 NLCS run to the title.
- Gregg Jefferies (born 1967) – Signed with the Phillies as a free agent in 1995 and played four seasons in Philadelphia, highlighted by becoming the first Phillie in 32 years to hit for the cycle, against the Dodgers on August 25, 1995.
- Brandon Kintzler (born 1984) – A veteran reliever who spent one season with the Phillies in 2021 on an incentive-laden minor-league deal, late in a long journeyman bullpen career.
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