Ted Lyons

Sport: Baseball

Induction Year: 1960

Induction Year: 1960

Ted Lyons pitched in the first major league baseball game he ever saw. It was on July 22, 1923, and Lyons—fresh off the campus of Baylor University—joined the Chicago White Sox for a game with the Detroit Tigers.

If Dave Winfield plays in 1992, he will join a select group of eight baseball players who spent at least 20 years in the major leagues without playing a single game in the minors.

Lyons, one of five Hall of Famers in that group, also belongs to an even more exclusive fraternity. Except for 10 old-timers who pitched before 1910, Lyons and Ferguson Jenkins (who was inducted in 1990) are the only major league pitchers who reached Cooperstown without reaching a single World Series.

On a clear day, you could see the first division when Lyon was pitching for the White Sox. But there weren’t many clear days. In his first season, just a few years after the Black Sox scandal of 1919, the White sox finished 30 games behind the champion Yankees. In the last year of his playing career (1946), when Lyons was the White Sox manager for the last half of the season, the team wound up 30 games behind the champion Red Sox. In between those milestones, their AVERAGE in the “games behind” column for his 21-year career was 30.

Five of those teams managed to finish in the first division, but none was higher than third or closer to the top than eight games. Lyons won 22 games for a 1930 team that won only 40 other games and finished 40 games off the pace. He won 10 and had the third best earned-run average in the league for the 1932 team that won that won only 39 other games and finished 56 1/2 games behind Joe McCarthy’s Yankees.

He was a great pitcher for lousy ball clubs, but Lyons had no regrets about spending his entire career with the White Sox.

“I didn’t find it frustrating,” Lyons said at the end of his career. “ I would have liked to have won more, but I’ll say this: My ball club always hustled for me. It would have been nice to win a pennant, just one, to see what it was like, but Chicago is a wonderful town, with wonderful fans, and I can’t say enough for them. It was a great way to make a living. Every day you start, you think you can win. And something different happens every day. You never see two games alike.”

Lyons won 260 games and had a career earned run average of 3.67—leading the American League in that category in 1942, at the age of 41, with 2.10. He led the league in shutouts in 1925 and 1940. In 1930, he was 22-15 and had a .311 batting average. (He had a career total of 364 base hits.) In 1926, he pitched a no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox.

In the era between World War I and World War II, Grover Cleveland Alexander was the only pitcher who had more complete games than Lyons. Winning 260 games for these White Sox teams was equal to winning 500 for the Yankees, Lyons’ 230 career losses are as impressive as his wins, considering the fact that two of the losingest pitchers in baseball history were Cy Young and Walter Johnson.

Early in his career, Lyons was facing Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Ty Cobb. Later, before his career was interrupted by a three-year service stint in World War II, he was going against Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams.

He started playing baseball at the age of eight in Vinton, L., using a “sockball” (a rolled-up sock, sewn together) and broomstick. He was a 90-pound second baseman in high school. Then he became a pitcher at the age of 16. Connie Mack, whose Philadelphia Athletics were in Lake Charles for their spring training at that time, offered to pay his way through college if he would sign with his club. But Lyons opted for the White Sox, who were training near Waco while he was at Baylor. When they gave him a $1,000 bonus, he bought a brand new 1923 Model T Ford for $428 and drove to Chicago.

When Lyons became the first baseball player to be inducted into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in 1960, former Baylor coach Frank Bridges came to
Shreveport for the ceremonies. It was a homecoming of sorts for Bridges, who had coached at old Shreveport High School before he led Baylor to two Southwest Conference football titles in six years as head coach.

Lyons had no trouble recalling his no-hitter. “I had been under the weather for a couple of days,” he said, “I walked the first man on four pitches, and fell behind the next batter with a 2-0 count. Then he hit a line shot to center field, and Johnny Mostril made a shoestring catch and doubled the runner off first. There was only one walk after that.”

With the wind blowing in that day, right fielder Bill Barrett played shorter than usual and caught a few bloopers that might have dropped in. The last batter Lyons faced was a former Southwest Conference rival from Texas A&M—Topper Rigney. He managed to hit an 0-2 curve to the right of White Sox first baseman Earl Sheely, but Sheely backhanded it and threw to Lyons—who kept running to the dugout after making the putout. By that time, spectators were already pouring out of the stands.

At the end of his career, Lyons was known as a “Sunday pitcher” because he could only pitch once a week and it was usually on Sunday—to attract the biggest crowds.

“The funny thing about it,” he recalled, “is that when I was a kid, my mother wouldn’t let me play ball on Sunday. For several years at the end of my career, it was the only day I played.”

Lyons was the White Sox manager for 2 1/2 seasons, but the team stayed in the second division and the kid who once drove his brand new Model T to the Windy City finally returned to Southwest Louisiana—with no regrets. He died in 1985.