In a Hall of Fame Strat-O-Matic matchup between the Boston Red Sox and the American League, the former prevailed 10-3. The lineups were:
American League
Tony Lazzeri (2b)
Larry Doby (CF)
Al Simmons (LF)
Hank Greenberg (1B)
Reggie Jackson (RF)
Harmon Killebrew (3B)
Lou Boudreau (SS)
Mickey Cochrane (C)
Bob Feller (P)
Boston Red Sox
Bobby Doerr (2B)
Carlton Fisk (C)
Jimmie Foxx (1B)
Babe Ruth (LF)
Wade Boggs (3B)
Carl Yastrzemski (CF)
Harry Hooper (RF)
Joe Cronin (SS)
Lefty Grove (P)
Jimmie Foxx slugged Bob Feller’s pitching in this simulation, notching three home runs and six RBI:
- 1st inning: Solo home run
- 3rd inning: Three-run home run (Doerr and Fisk on base—each singled)
- 7th inning: Two-run home run (Fisk on base—single)
Foxx also walked in the 5th inning and scored on Babe Ruth’s two-run home run; he singled in the 8th but got stranded when Ruth struck out to end the inning. The other runs for the Red Sox Hall of Famers came from:
- 4th inning: Carl Yastrzemski solo home run
- 7th inning: Babe Ruth solo home run
Inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1951, Foxx began his career with the Philadelphia A’s in 1925. Helmed by Connie Mack for the first half of the 20th century, the A’s won the World Series in 1929 and 1930. A third consecutive World Series championship was not to be—the A’s lost to the Cardinals in 1931.
Foxx won back-to-back MVP awards in 1932 and 1933; a third MVP award came in 1938.
It was a nearly unanimous tally for the first award—voters at the Baseball Writers’ Association of American gave him 75 out of 80 possible points; Lou Gehrig had the next highest total—55 points. 1932 was the year that Foxx scored 58 dingers, just two shy of Babe Ruth’s single season record of 60.
On November 2, 1938, Foxx became the first player to win the MVP three times. Now with the Boston Red Sox, Foxx surprised the baseball world with his ascent. Associated Press noted that the slugger “made a gallant comeback after being considered on the downward trail a year ago, and bothered all this year by a sinus infection.”
In his MVP seasons, Foxx led the major leagues in several offensive categories:
- Home runs (except for 1938)
- RBI
- Slugging percentage
- On-Base + Slugging percentage
- Total Bases
Foxx led the American League in batting average in 1933 and 1938; his 50 home runs trailed Hank Greenberg’s 58 in 1938. When Foxx’s career ended in 1945, staggering numbers joined the annals of baseball’s greatest players—534 home runs, .325 batting average, .609 slugging percentage.
Foxx biographer W. Harrison Daniel, in his 1996 book Jimmie Foxx: The Life and Times of a Baseball Hall of Fame, 1907-1967, notes that 1938 presented a turning point for the farm-raised ballplayer from Sudlersville, Maryland—a rural town with a population that has hovered around the 500 mark for the past 100 years.
Citing a title search at the Sudlersville Memorial Library, Daniel wrote, “Although 1938 was a memorable year in Foxx’s career, it was also the year that he abandoned any interest in returning to the farm. Ten years earlier Jimmie had made a down payment on a farm near Sudlersville and he was quoted as saying this was an investment for the future and that he hoped to retire to the farm after his playing days. It appears that Foxx’s parents lived on the farm until around 1938, when they moved into a house in the village of Sudlersville which they had purchased in 1925 and formerly rented out. Jimmie’s farm, in 1938, had a mortgage of $7,000.00 which he had not paid off. In this year the mortgage was paid and the property was transferred to J.C. Jones on June 8, 1938.”
Upon Foxx’s election to the Hall of Fame in 1951, Boston Globe sportswriter Harold Kaese noted the slugger’s urbanity off the field. “Foxx was a gentleman all right, even though he was raised on a farm and good-naturedly squirted tobacco juice on the shoes of his friends when they walked into the dugout,” wrote Kaese. “I know he was a gentleman because as the Red Sox broke training camp one Spring, and headed for Boston, he said, ‘I’ll be glad to get out of the South. You can’t even get a decent manicure down here.'”
On January 13, 1967, Foxx received the Maryland Professional Baseball Players Association’s Sultan of Swat Crown retroactively at the annual Tops in Sports banquet in Baltimore for Outstanding Batting Achievement. Illness forced Foxx to accept the award in absentia; former Orioles manager and former Foxx teammate Jimmy Dykes accepted on his behalf. Frank Robinson, a key cog in the Orioles’ machine that brought down the Dodgers in a four-game sweep of the previous year’s World Series received the Sultan of Swat Crown for 1966 and fellow Maryland native Lefty Grove also received an award at the event. Foxx passed away six months later.
Today, Foxx’s Sultan of Swat Crown sits in Sudlersville Memorial Library as a testament to the farm boy who became a baseball superstar but never forgot where he came from. Generations of Sudlersville families remain in town, offering continuity of community—if a Sudlersvillean goes to the library, the grocery store, or the bank, he or she is likely to triple the time allotted for the task because conversations, serious and casual, will commence. In a town where everybody knows everybody else, gossip is not the watchword. Rather, the verbal exchanges ignite the thoughtful question “How can I help?” rather than the judgmental statement “That’s too bad.”
If a trek occurs near the intersection of Main Street and Church Street, the conversation may include the topic of baseball, specifically, the man embodied by the statue there. It’s a pose of a baseball player after one of his mighty right-handed swings—the one who decimated American League pitching, became a baseball hero to Philadelphians and Bostonians, and inspired the character Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks, in A League of Their Own.
James Emory Foxx.
A version of this article appeared on www.thesportspost.com on February 4, 2017.