May 12, 2002
Reprinted with permission from the San Antonio Express-News, 4/28/02
by David King
Eighty-two years ago, a postgame brawl between students from Baylor and Texas A&M helped launch a Hall of Fame baseball career.
Ted Lyons was a trombone-playing kid from Vinton, La., when a typically heated football game got a little overheated. Feeling all the Baylor pride he could muster, Lyons set his horn aside and joined the fray.
When things settled down, his meal ticket to Waco - the trombone, which he was playing for a half-scholarship - had a distinct footprint or two.
"That ended my musical career," Lyons told Dave Campbell of the Waco Tribune-Herald in 1956.
So he pitched for the Bears, in addition to playing basketball. His senior year, 1923, he led Baylor to its first Southwest Conference baseball title.
As a publicity stunt, a photographer brought Chicago White Sox catcher Ray Schalk from the Sox's spring training camp to Baylor's practice to catch the hard- throwing Lyons . Schalk obliged the photographer for a while, then raced to the team hotel, where he found Chicago manager Kid Gleason.
His report: Sign this kid.
Lyons took Chicago's offer of a $1,000 bonus and $300 a month. On July 2, in the first big-league game he ever saw, Lyons pitched a 1-2-3 eighth inning against the St. Louis Browns.
The Sox started a rally in the top of the ninth, and the pitcher's spot came up.
"I grabbed a couple of bats and started swinging them," Lyons recalled in '56. "(Acting manager Eddie) Collins said 'What are you doing, young fellow? I guess they didn't take you out for a hitter at Baylor, huh?' Eddie got a big kick out of me wanting to hit."
Turns out, Collins probably should have let Lyons hit - in his 21 years in the pros, he hit .233, including .311 in 1930.
He used to joke about his hitting, once noting that he "knocked a hot dog out of the bun in a fan's hands and the mustard didn't even splatter."
Lyons needed a sense of humor to pitch for the woeful Sox, who finished first in the division just five times in his 21 seasons. Still, he won 21 games in 1925 and 22 in 1927. He pitched 82/3 innings of a perfect game in '25 and a no-hitter the next year. After he blew out his shoulder in 1931, he resorted to the knuckleball and an assortment of other deliveries and continued to baffle hitters from Babe Ruth to Ted Williams ("Lyons was tough, and he got tougher the more you faced him," Williams once said). In 1939, when Lyons was 38, Sox manager Jimmie Dykes made him into a "Sunday pitcher." Throwing just once a week, in half of a Sunday doubleheader, Lyons made the All-Star Game.
The Sunday starts lasted through 1942, and he responded by going 52-30. In '42, he was 14-6 with 20 complete games and a 2.10 ERA.
Lyons joined the Marines at the end of that season and saw combat duty in the Pacific - as well as a familiar face. In an exhibition game in Guam, Joe DiMaggio showed up on the opposing team.
"I left the country to get away from DiMaggio," Lyons said, "and here he is!"
Lyons pitched one season after the war, wrapping up his career with a 250-230 record and an ERA of 3.67. He made the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955 - the only SWC player before or since in Cooperstown.
And all it took was a little brawl and a large footprint.
