Jimmy Williams: Life in Baseball’s Minor Leagues

Jimmy Williams, coach for the Baltimore Orioles. Credit: Wikipedia

Jimmy Williams played in over 2000 games and he even earned a World Series ring.

Only a true baseball lifer could enjoy a 40-year career – all but the last seven of them in the minor leagues -- and finish with a smile, a million stories, and not a bit of regret over what might have been.

He played in over 2,000 games at every level from Class D to AAA before finishing his career as a coach for the Baltimore Orioles 1981-1987, earning a prize that eluded a lot of big league Hall of Famers: a World Series ring.

He shared his stories with us during several visits at his home in Baltimore.-Norman L. Macht

The baseball saga of Jimmy Williams began when the Toronto native, a sandlot third baseman, was spotted by a Brooklyn Dodgers scout in 1947 and invited to a tryout camp. He was among the few hopefuls who were offered contracts.

“They called me into the office and offered me $150 a month. I bravely asked for $160 and got it, but the truth is, if they had told me, ‘Jim, we’ll charge you $15 a week to play pro ball,’ I think I would have gone out and gotten a job so I could pay them. That’s how much we wanted to play.”

To comprehend what followed, you have to understand the chain gang system that once prevailed in baseball.

It was created by Branch Rickey when he presided over the St. Louis Cardinals in the mid-1920s and installed in Brooklyn when he moved there in 1943.

Jimmy Williams spent 18 years in the Dodgers’ system, rapping out 2,017 hits for a .290 lifetime average, and never swung a bat in the major leagues.

His contract was sold from one Dodgers’ affiliate to another. There was no escape.

But the affable Williams never complained as he traversed the Dodgers’ gulags from Kingston in the Border League to Montreal, making 15 stops in all.

For most of those years, he played at AA Mobile and Atlanta and AAA Montreal, where life was good and the salaries were better than some big leaguers earned.

Remember, this was a time when only the stars – DiMaggio, Williams, Mantle, Musial – strode in the thin air of the $100,000 stratosphere.

Like most minor league nomads, he held other jobs during the winters; for 37 years he never lived and worked a full year in the same town. 

Landing in Sheboygan, Wisconsin

After a brief debut at Kingston, Jimmy shipped out to Sheboygan in the Wisconsin State League.

When the train pulled into the station, he was still a third baseman. But when he walked out of the depot he became an outfielder.

“It was 5:30 in the morning when I got there, too early to call the general manager, so I sat down to wait and got to talking to a guy sweeping out the station. He saw my bag and asked if I was coming to join the Indians and I said yeah.

“He said, ‘What position do you play?’

“I told him third base. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘we got the best third baseman in the league.’

“I said, ‘What about short?’

“He says, ‘Our shortstop looks like he’s going to be rookie of the year. He can really pick it.’

“I said, ‘What about second?’

“’ Oh, that’s Tommy Bartose. He’s been with us for years and, besides, he drives the bus.’

“So I’m sitting there thinking all this over and then it’s time to call the GM and he comes and gets me and takes me around town and we go to meet the manager, Joe Hauser, who says to me, ‘What position do you play?’

“I said, ‘What do you need?”

“’A left fielder,’ he says.

“‘I play left field,’ I said.

“And that’s how I became an outfielder.”

Like many players, Williams remembers his rookie year in pro ball with special fondness. Hitting .385 with 105 RBIs in 86 games helped.  And he was named Rookie of the Year, not the shortstop.

“We ran away with the pennant. But what stands out most is the bus rides, talking baseball for hours.

At night after a road game, we’d pass through these small towns in Wisconsin, and Joe Hauser would say, ‘Let’s let them know we’re going through their town.’

So no matter how late it was, we all sang ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ every time we rode through a town.”

A Lesson from Joe Hauser

Joe Hauser, the home run king of the minors who hit 63 for Baltimore in 1930 and 69 in 1933 for Minneapolis, taught Williams a batting lesson he never forgot.

“Joe was 48 then, a left-handed batter. He’d grab a new bat and tell us, ‘This is what hitting is all about. I’m going to hit the ball to left field.’ Ping. He’d hit it to left. Didn’t matter where the pitcher threw it.

Then he’d say, ‘I’m going to hit it to center,’ and he did. Then he’d point to right and hit one there.  ‘You hit for power this way,’ he demonstrated and hit one over the fence.

“Then he’d show us the bat. There was one mark on it the size of the ball. He had hit every one on the sweet spot of the bat. ‘That’s the secret of hitting,’ he said.

That, and hitting the ball out in front of the plate, is all the secret to hitting I ever found.”

Leaving his playing days behind

After his playing days, Williams managed in the minors for 17 years, beginning at Santa Barbara in 1963.

He worked at every level except rookie leagues in the Dodgers, Kansas City A’s, Houston and Baltimore organizations, winning four pennants.

He was a strict disciplinarian, making rules and sticking to them. “If I said the bus leaves at two, we left at two, and if some guy came running up two minutes later, he was out of luck.”

But he also knew the value of a few cases of beer in the clubhouse after a game to keep the players together talking baseball instead of dressing quickly and scattering.

He taught as much from the manager’s traditional seat by the door on the all-night bus rides as he did on the field. But he never hankered to be a big league manager.

“Sparky Anderson is younger than I am, but he sure doesn’t look it,” he said in explanation.

Williams finally made the big leagues in 1981 when Baltimore manager Earl Weaver brought him up as a first base coach. That’s where he was when the Orioles earned him a World Series ring in 1983.

The following year he picked up an All-Star ring when O’s manager Joe Altobelli added him to the AL team as a coach.

When Cal Ripken Sr. moved from the third base coach’s box to the dugout to manage the Orioles in 1987, Jimmy replaced him at third. He retired after that season.

Earl Weaver’s Superstitions

As superstitious as most players, Jimmy couldn’t hold a candle to Earl Weaver. “We had lost the first two games at Oakland on a western trip.

I walked into the clubhouse area where the manager and coaches dressed and started to change. I’m sitting on the stool and Weaver is sitting behind me, staring at me. I start pulling on my sanitaries and I hear his voice: ‘Goddammit, don’t you ever put the right one on first?’

“I turned around, startled. He said, ‘You, don’t you ever put the right one on first?’

“What do you mean?”

“He said, ‘You put that left sock on first the last two days and we lost two games. Put the right one on first and see what happens.’

“I said, ‘Okay.’ So I took the sock off and put it on my right leg, and I think we won that night.

Then we went to Anaheim and he was not around when I got dressed so I put the left one on first and we won that night too. But he was really very serious about things like that.

If we won a game, the next day when he went to get a cab to the ballpark, if you had ridden with him the day before you were okay, but if you hadn’t, you didn’t get in that cab.”

Williams considered Cal Ripken Jr., whom he managed at Charlotte, the best all-around player he saw in the minors.

“Later, when he came up to the Orioles, we coaches had a separate lounge at Memorial Stadium where we had our postgame feed and talked over the game. Cal often joined us, asking questions and absorbing the lessons in the air.”