Driving south from Tucson on Arizona Highway 80, beyond the Wild West outpost-turned-tourist trap of Tombstone, past an endless landscape of sagebrush and cactus, you enter a tunnel carved into the Mule Mountains near the Mexican border. When you exit that tunnel, it’s as if you have traveled back in time. Welcome to Bisbee, Arizona.

For a brief period at the beginning of the twentieth century, Bisbee was America’s largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco, boasting a peak population of nearly 30,000 residents. Copper was king then, and this mile-high mining camp had the good fortune of being one of the richest mineral sites in the world. The mines around Bisbee, operated mostly by the Phelps Dodge, Calumet & Arizona and Shattuck mining companies, ultimately produced eight billion pounds of copper until they were shut down in the mid-1970s. For most mining towns, that was a fate worse than death. But Bisbee survived, thanks to the emergence of a vibrant artists’ scene, and is thriving in the twenty-first century — and so is its unlikely crown jewel, Warren Ballpark.

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Warren Ballpark, built in 1909, is one of the oldest professional baseball stadiums in the United States. (Its supporters claim Warren is the oldest[1], but several other existing ballparks, such as Rickwood Field[2] in Birmingham, Alabama, have stronger claims to that title.) It has hosted beloved baseball luminaries such as John McGraw, Connie Mack and Honus Wagner and disgraced “outlaws” such as Hal Chase, Chick Gandil and Buck Weaver. Thousands of minor league, semipro, high school and amateur players have called it home. Since its centennial anniversary in 2009, it has also hosted the annual Copper City Classic vintage baseball tournament, which raises money to help the nonprofit Friends of Warren Ballpark keep the park in good shape for years to come.

Spectators still enter the concrete-and-adobe grandstand — where else can you find a ballpark made of traditional adobe brick? — to watch a game with the same striking view of the Warren district hills as they did 100 years ago. The effects of copper mining are readily visible at the ballpark, from the bright red sulfide streaks running down the plateau beyond first base to the manual scoreboard in left field with a crumbling Phelps-Dodge sponsorship sign.

As Bisbee baseball historian Mike Anderson wrote, “It is a living history museum … a direct connection to those ballparks and to all of the long-vanished fields that were once a vital part of community life in hundreds of towns and cities across America.”

From its earliest days, thanks to the railroad line running directly behind the outfield fence, Warren Ballpark was a frequent stop for barnstorming major league teams. On November 7, 1913, manager John McGraw of the New York Giants brought two teams to Bisbee for an exhibition game that included future Hall of Famers Tris Speaker, Sam Crawford, Ray Schalk and Red Faber, along with Olympic champion Jim Thorpe. The game was part of an around-the-world postseason tour organized by McGraw and Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, intended to introduce baseball to other nations. After crossing the United States and sailing across the Pacific Ocean, the Giants and White Sox staged exhibition games in Japan, China, Egypt, Italy, France, England and other exotic locales. The tour was a wild success. Warren Ballpark is the only baseball stadium to host a game on the 1913-14 world tour that survives today.[3]

On the field that day were Buck Weaver and Hal Chase, who several years later were implicated for their involvement in the Black Sox Scandal, the plot to fix the 1919 World Series. Weaver was banned from organized baseball for life for “guilty knowledge” of the fix, while Chase — long rumored to be baseball’s most notorious game-fixer — was quietly blackballed from the game. Weaver and Chase resurfaced in the mid-1920s in southern Arizona as part of an independent “outlaw” league known as the Copper League (or Frontier League) which was outside the jurisdiction of organized baseball. Chase persuaded Weaver and his exiled Black Sox teammates Chick Gandil and Lefty Williams to join the league in 1925. Bisbee began fielding a Copper League team a year later, but their management was adamant that banned major leaguers not be used. This stance hurt Bisbee’s performance on the field, but put the city in the good graces of baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who in 1928 awarded Bisbee its first professional minor league team in the Arizona State League.

Warren Ballpark hosted low-level minor league baseball off and on from 1928 to 1955. Among the notable players to come through Bisbee were Syd Cohen, who served up Babe Ruth’s last home run as a Yankee in 1934; Tuck Stainback, an outfielder for 13 years in the big leagues; Jim Tobin, who threw a no-hitter for the Boston Braves and is the only modern pitcher to hit three home runs in a major league game; and Clint “Scrap Iron” Courtney, the bespectacled catcher known for his long-running feud with the Yankees’ Billy Martin. That feud began in 1947, when both were in the Arizona-Texas League. Another Bisbee minor league alum, Bert Shepard, was shot down over Germany during World War II but made an inspiring return to baseball in 1945, when he became the only major leaguer to make an appearance with an artificial leg, pitching five strong innings in a game for the Washington Senators.

Warren Ballpark’s baseball legacy is only a piece of its history. In 1917, it played a role in one of the most notorious incidents in the American labor movement, the Bisbee Deportation, an event that still divides residents today. On July 12, a heavily armed posse led by Cochise County Sheriff Henry Wheeler rounded up more than 1,500 striking copper miners in downtown Bisbee and marched them at gunpoint four miles south to Warren Ballpark. Two men were killed during the roundup. It was just four months after the United States entered World War I, and tensions were high, especially in industries like copper mining that were considered essential to the war effort. The mineworkers were members of the International Workers of the World, or “Wobblies,” and local newspapers portrayed them as unpatriotic anarchists, German sympathizers, and Bolsheviks.

After the long march, which drew a large crowd of onlookers, the 1,500 strikers were detained for hours in the grandstand at Warren Ballpark, guarded by machine guns. The strikers were given one final chance to go back to work; most refused. Soon, 23 special boxcars pulled up on the railroad outside the ballpark. The estimated 1,182 strikers were ordered to board the boxcars. No food or water was given to them. The train took a long, slow ride into New Mexico. When it reached its destination — a small Army facility in Columbus — the cargo was refused because there were no accommodations. On the train’s return trip, the guards abandoned the men in Hermanas and told them never to return to Bisbee. They were left there without shelter for two days until U.S. troops arrived. Families may have been torn apart, but the mines went right back to business as usual.[4]

Today’s Bisbee residents know Warren Ballpark as a high school stadium. In the twenty-first century, the Bisbee Pumas baseball team — diminished in stature for a generation after Phelps Dodge shut down the mines in 1974 and the town’s population tumbled — won Arizona state championships in 2002 and 2008, and the football team carries on Arizona’s oldest high school rivalry with nearby Douglas High.

“His fastball was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It really rose as it left his hand. If you told him to aim the ball at home plate, that ball would cross the plate at the batter’s shoulders. That was because of the tremendous backspin he could put on the ball.”

– Pat Gillick

No one ever threw harder or had more of a star-crossed career than Steve Dalkowski. Old-timers love to reminisce about this fireballer and wonder what would have happened if he had reached the Major Leagues.

In 1963, near the end of spring training, Dalkowski struck out 11 batters in 7 2/3 innings. The myopic, 23-year-old left-hander with thick glasses was slated to head north as the Baltimore Orioles’ short-relief man. He was even fitted for a big league uniform. But in a Grapefruit League contest against the New York Yankees, disaster struck. Dalkowski fanned Roger Maris on three pitches and struck out four in two innings that day. Yet as he threw a slider to Phil Linz, he felt something pop in his elbow. Despite the pain, Dalkowski tried to carry on. But when he pitched to the next batter, Bobby Richardson, the ball flew to the screen. With that, Dalkowski came out of the game and the phenom who had been turning heads—so much that Ted Williams said he would never step in the batter’s box against him—was never the same.

Pat Gillick, who would later lead three teams to World Series championships (Toronto in 1992 and 1993, Philadelphia in 2008), was a young pitcher in the Orioles’ organization when Dalkowski came along. “I first met him in spring training in 1960,” Gillick said. “The minors were already filled with stories about him. How he knocked somebody’s ear off and how he could throw a ball through just about anything. He had a great arm but unfortunately he was never able to harness that great fastball of his. His fastball was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It really rose as it left his hand. If you told him to aim the ball at home plate, that ball would cross the plate at the batter’s shoulders. That was because of the tremendous backspin he could put on the ball.”

That amazing, rising fastball would perplex managers, friends, and catchers from the sandlots back in New Britain, Connecticut where Dalkowski grew up, throughout his roller-coaster ride in the Orioles’ farm system. Some advised him to aim below the batter’s knees, even at home plate, itself. Perhaps that was the only way to control this kind of high heat and keep it anywhere close to the strike zone. “Even then I often had to jump to catch it,” Len Pare, one of Dalkowski’s high school catchers, once told me. “That fastball? I’ve never seen another one like it. He’d let it go and it would just rise and rise.”

What made this pitch even more amazing was that Dalkowski didn’t have anything close to the classic windup. No high leg kick like Bob Feller or Satchel Paige, for example. Instead Dalkowski almost short-armed the ball with an abbreviated delivery that kept batters all the more off balance and left them shocked at what was too soon coming their way.

During his 16-year professional career, Dalkowski came as close as he ever would to becoming a complete pitcher when he hooked up with Earl Weaver, a manager who could actually help him, in 1962 at Elmira, New York. For the first time, Dalkowski began to throw strikes. During one 53-inning stretch, he struck out 111 and walked only 11.

In an effort to save the prospect’s career, Weaver told Dalkowski to throw only two pitches—fastball and slider—and simply concentrate on getting the ball over the plate. Dalkowski went on to have his best year ever. In his final 57 innings of the ‘62 season, he gave up one earned run, struck out 110, and walked only 21.

He appeared destined for the Major Leagues as a bullpen specialist for the Orioles when he hurt his elbow in the spring of 1963. The cruel irony, of course, is that Dalkowski could have been patched up in this day and age. Tommy John surgery undoubtedly would have put him back on the mound. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been as fast as before, but he would have had another chance at the big leagues.

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Yet when the Orioles broke camp and headed north for the start of the regular season in 1963, Dalkowski wasn’t with the club. Instead, he started the season in Rochester and couldn’t win a game. From there he was demoted back to Elmira, but by then not even Weaver could help him. In what should have been his breakthrough season, Dalkowski won two games, throwing just 41 innings. His legendary fastball was gone and soon he was out of baseball.

At loose ends, Dalkowski began to work the fields of California’s San Joaquin Valley in places like Lodi, Fresno, and Bakersfield. He became one of the few gringos, and the only Polish one at that, among the migrant workers. During this time, he became hooked on cheap wine—the kind of hooch that goes for pocket change and can be spiked with additives and ether. White port was Dalkowski’s favorite. In order to keep up the pace in the fields he often placed a bottle at the end of the next row that needed picking. That gave him incentive to keep working faster.

Dalkowski picked cotton, oranges, apricots, and lemons. He married a woman from Stockton. After they split up two years later, he met his second wife, Virginia Greenwood, while picking oranges in Bakersfield. But none of it had the chance to stick, not as long as Dalkowski kept drinking himself to death. He was arrested more times for disorderly conduct than anybody can remember. He was sentenced to time on a road crew several times and ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. For years, the Baseball Assistance Team, which helps former players who have fallen on hard times, tried to reach out to Dalkowski. This was how he lived for some 25 years—until he finally touched bottom. In 1991, the authorities recommended that Dalkowski go into alcoholic rehab. But during processing, he ran away and ended up living on the streets of Los Angeles.

“At that point we thought we had no hope of ever finding him again,” said his sister, Pat Cain, who still lived in the family’s hometown of New Britain. “He had fallen in with the derelicts, and they stick together. We thought the next we’d hear of him was when he turned up dead somewhere.

On Christmas Eve 1992, Dalkowski walked into a laundromat in Los Angeles and began talking to a family there. They soon realized he didn’t have much money and was living on the streets. The family convinced Dalkowski to come home with them. In a few days, Cain received word that her big brother was still alive. Soon he reunited with his second wife and they moved to Oklahoma City, trying for a fresh start. But within months, Virginia suffered a stroke and died in early 1994.

That’s when Dalkowski came home—for good. With his family’s help, he moved into the Walnut Hill Care Center in New Britain, near where he used to play high school ball. Slowly, Dalkowski showed signs of turning the corner. One evening he started to blurt out the answers to a sports trivia game the family was playing. Bill Huber, his old coach, took him to Sunday services at the local Methodist church until Dalkowski refused to go one week. His mind had cleared enough for him to remember he had grown up Catholic.

Less than a decade after returning home, Dalkowski found himself at a place in life he thought he would never reach—the pitching mound in Baltimore. Granted much had changed since Dalkowski was a phenom in the Orioles’ system. Home for the big league club was no longer cozy Memorial Stadium but the retro red brick of Camden Yards. On September 8, 2003, Dalkowski threw out the ceremonial first pitch before an Orioles game against the Seattle Mariners while his friends Boog Powell and Pat Gillick watched. “I bounced it,” Dalkowski says, still embarrassed by the miscue. Yet nobody else in attendance cared. “He was back on the pitching mound,” Gillick recalls. “Back where he belonged.”

———————————————————————————————————

Whenever I’m passing through Connecticut, I try to visit Steve and his sister, Pat. It’s comforting to see that the former pitching phenom, now 73, remains a hero in his hometown.

A few years ago, when I was finishing my book High Heat: The Secret History of the Fastball and the Impossible Search for the Fastest Pitcher of All Time, I needed to assemble a list of the hardest throwers ever. Not an easy feat when you try to estimate how Walter Johnson, Smoky Joe Wood, Satchel Paige, or Bob Feller would have done in our world of pitch counts and radar guns.

But that said, you can assemble a quality cast of the fastest of the fast pretty easily. Include Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax with those epic fireballers. Then add such contemporary stars as Stephen Strasburg and Aroldis Chapman, and you’re pretty much there.

For a time I was tempted to rate Dalkowski as the fastest ever. The stories surrounding him amaze me to this day. Yet it was his old mentor, Earl Weaver, who sort of talked me out of it. “It’s tough to call him the fastest ever because he never pitched in the majors,” Weaver said. “How do you rate somebody like Steve Dalkowski? That’s tough to do.

When I think about him today, I find myself wondering what could have been. That’s where he’ll always be for me. What could have been.”

For decades, baseball’s Reserve Clause bound a player to a team unless he was traded, sold, or released. A player had zero bargaining power at contract time other than refusing the owner’s terms, forcing him to quit baseball.

The “status quo” of the Reserve Clause received its first litmus test following a trade on October 7, 1969, in which St. Louis Cardinals star outfielder Curt Flood was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies along with Tim McCarver, Joe Hoerner, and Byron Browne for Richie Allen, Cookie Rojas, and Jerry Johnson.

Born in Houston, Texas, in 1938, and raised in Oakland, California, Curt Flood attended West Oakland’s McClymonds High School, playing in the same outfield as fellow African-Americans Vada Pinson and Frank Robinson. All three were gobbled up by the Cincinnati Reds for $4,000 each. The Reds kept Pinson and Robinson but let Flood go to the Cardinals in December 1957 as part of a five-player deal. In St. Louis, the 5-foot-9, 165-pound Flood excelled in center field by winning seven straight Gold Gloves from 1963 to 1969. He also hit .300 on six occasions and contributed to three National League pennants and two World Championships. “I gave a hundred percent all the time,” Flood said years later.

When the October 7, 1969, trade transpired, Flood was upset for being notified by a subordinate member of the Cardinals management, not GM Bing Devine himself. Flood had the suspicion he was let go because he had wanted another $10,000 to bring his yearly salary to an even $100,000, and that he had criticized management in the press for making moves part-way through 1969 in anticipation of the team not appearing in the World Series, after back-to-back appearances in 1967 and 1968.

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Thinking it through carefully, Flood decided that after 12 years in St. Louis, he was not going to pick up and move his family. He didn’t like Philadelphia. The Phillies were horrible, and their dilapidated home field, Connie Mack Stadium, should have been torn down long ago. Also, Flood didn’t like how the black players were treated there. The best example was the other big name in the trade, Richie Allen, who had taken so much verbal and garbage-throwing abuse in Philly that he began wearing a batting helmet while playing first base. Flood believed he should have the right to negotiate with other clubs for his services the same way individuals had the freedom to do in other vocations. Contracts should have a beginning and an end, he thought. To the Cardinal outfielder, the Reserve Clause was slavery.

Flood contacted Marvin Miller, executive director of the newly established, two-year-old Major League Baseball Players Association. Miller informed Flood that a Reserve Clause fight could not be won and that it would certainly ruin the player’s career in the process. Flood asked if it would benefit players in the future. Miller said it would. If Flood wished to pursue the legal battle, Miller promised Players Association funding to handle the legal costs.

Flood then wrote MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn the following letter on December 24, 1969:

After twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several States.

It is my desire to play baseball in 1970, and I am capable of playing. I have received a contract offer from the Philadelphia club, but I believe I have the right to consider offers from other clubs before making any decision. I, therefore, request that you make known to all Major League clubs my feelings in this matter, and advise them of my availability for the 1970 season.

As expected, Kuhn denied Flood’s request for free agency. Flood then filed a $1 million lawsuit against Kuhn and Major League Baseball for violating U.S. antitrust laws. Players Association reps supported Flood, while many rank-and-file players sided with the owners. A few months later, at the start of the 1970 season, the Cardinals sent the Phillies two minor leaguers to compensate for Flood’s refusal to report. Then, later that same year, the owners voted in the “10/5 Rule.” Nicknamed the “Curt Flood Rule,” it stated that a player with 10 years of Major League service and the last five years with the same club could veto any trade. Too-little, too-late for Flood. In November, the Phillies traded him to the Washington Senators for three players. Flood played 13 games in 1971, hit .200, then retired with a lifetime .293 batting average.

The long-anticipated trial finally began in New York City before the U.S. Supreme Court on March 20, 1972. Testifying on Flood’s behalf were former star players Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson and former owner Bill Veeck. No active players came to Flood’s defense or even attended the trial for fear of reprisals. When the ruling came down on June 19, 1972, the owners won by a 5–3–1 margin. The panel of judges cited earlier challenges to the Reserve Clause in 1922 and 1953, whereby the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Sherman Antitrust Act as not applicable to baseball. Flood lost, but his challenge banged a good-sized dent in the owners’ armor.

Two more significant legal cases soon followed. The first one involved Oakland Athletics pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter, who had just come off a tremendous 1974 season in which he won the American League Cy Young Award with 25 wins and a 2.49 ERA and helped his team to a third straight World Series championship. It was also his fourth consecutive 20-win season. Paid $100,000 for the year, $50,000 of it—as per his contract—was supposed to be placed in a North Carolina bank in monthly payments on an insurance annuity. But it didn’t get there. Hunter asked A’s owner Charlie Finley about it on several occasions. “It’s in the mail,” was Finley’s reply.

With Marvin Miller’s help, Hunter filed for arbitration that December and won on a clear violation of his contract agreement. Major League Baseball declared Hunter a free agent, sending shockwaves throughout the sports world. In a blink of an eye, 23 of 24 teams made bids for the pitcher’s services. Inside two weeks, Hunter signed a five-year contract with the New York Yankees for $3.35 million. He went out and won 23 games in 1975, his fifth straight season winning 20 games, then he helped the Yankees win three straight pennants from 1976 to 1978.

Next, prior to the 1975 season, pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally were heavy into contract squabbles with their respective teams, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Montreal Expos. Both players decided to play the season anyway. Under the Reserve Clause rules, they would each be paid their previous contract. McNally left the Expos in June after a 3–6 record and planned to retire by the end of the year. Messersmith finished with 19 wins. As soon as the season ended, Marvin Miller urged the two pitchers to file grievances through the Players Association, arguing that a disputed contract should be renewed for only one year, and after that a player should be declared a free agent. This was a direct challenge to the owners’ thinking that contracts were indefinite. Even though McNally still planned to retire, he was important to the cause. Two players were better than one.

On December 23, 1975, baseball’s arbitrator Peter M. Seitz sent even more shock waves through the sports world when he agreed with the Players Association. By refusing to sign, both pitchers were declared free agents and could sell their services to any team. Via this historic judgment, the owners finally caved in. At first, the decision didn’t bring about the total free agency we see today. Management and Marvin Miller worked out a deal granting the players full negotiating freedom after six MLB seasons. McNally retired as expected, but Messersmith signed a multi-year contract with the Atlanta Braves. Over the next few years, player salaries jumped from a $45,000 average in 1975 to over $2 million by 2002.

Curt Flood left the country following the 1972 ruling. An artist in his spare time, he ran a bar on the Spanish island of Majorca and returned to Oakland four years later. In 1978, he joined the Oakland Athletics broadcasting team. Flood died of throat cancer on January 20, 1997. Nine years later, his 1989 oil painting of Joe DiMaggio sold at auction for $9,500. Every Major Leaguer since 1975 should be grateful to Curt Flood, a star player who helped shatter the Reserve Clause barriers for the sake of future players.

After retirement, Mickey Mantle was asked countless times how he would’ve handled free agency if he was playing in the modern era. He never wavered in his reply. “I’d walk into the owner’s office and say, ‘Hi yuh, partner.’”

“Charlie Hustle” was back in the news recently, making his case for reinstatement. Pete Rose’s banishment from baseball is a saga that’s well known to most fans—the then-Cincinnati Reds manager agreed to a lifetime ban from Commissioner Bart Giamatti in 1989 after an investigation revealed that he had bet on his own team for years. His actions cast doubt on the integrity of those games and violated baseball’s cardinal rule against gambling, enacted after the 1919 World Series was tarnished by the Black Sox Scandal.

For the last quarter-century, it seems that no season can pass by without a mention of baseball’s all-time Hit King, the last player who was subject to the game’s ultimate punishment. Rose has made a loud and public call to have his name cleared and gain eligibility for the Hall of Fame, and his many supporters and fans have taken up the cause, in Cincinnati and beyond. Baseball’s new commissioner, Rob Manfred, has said that he will consider the possibility of reinstatement and plans to meet with Rose to discuss the case.

While it’s unlikely that Rose’s ban will be lifted anytime soon, he wouldn’t be the first Cincinnati Reds player to be “permanently” banned from baseball—and then reinstated years later.

The story of Ray Fisher is mostly forgotten today, but the Major League pitcher turned legendary college coach serves as a direct link between the Black Sox Scandal and Pete Rose’s Reds. Fisher spent his six decades in baseball purgatory dedicated to teaching the game to young players at the University of Michigan, few of whom knew about the harsh punishment he was serving in silence. Fisher’s case provides an important precedent for Rose in his hope to be restored to baseball’s good graces. He’s also a prime example of how baseball’s “permanent” bans are sometimes anything but.

Ray Fisher was a rare breed during the Deadball Era, an educated ballplayer who graduated from Middlebury College in his native Vermont before making his Major League debut with the New York Yankees in 1910. The right-hander developed a hard-breaking spitball to go along with an effective fastball, and occasionally he placed among the American League leaders in ERA and shutouts. After a few seasons plagued by a tuberculosis-related illness and military service during World War I, he was acquired by the Cincinnati Reds in 1919.

Behind a deep pitching staff and a well-balanced offense, the Reds won their first NL pennant, as Fisher posted a 14–5 record with a 2.17 ERA. In the World Series against the Chicago White Sox, Fisher started and lost Game 3 against “Honest” Dickey Kerr, the only Chicago starting pitcher during the series who wasn’t conspiring with gamblers to lose to the Reds. Cincinnati won the best-of-nine affair, five games to three, without much trouble.

Fisher’s troubles were just beginning, however. Before the 1920 season began, baseball’s powers-that-be banned the spitball, Fisher’s best pitch. The Reds were allowed to select two pitchers to continue throwing the wet one, and Fisher was on their list. But at the age of 32, he knew his playing days were numbered, and he began to keep an eye out for potential employment after baseball. Earlier in his career, he had gone back to Middlebury College in the offseason to teach physical education, and some sportswriters “delighted in calling him ‘the Vermont schoolmaster’” after they found out.

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In the meantime, Cincinnati owner August “Garry” Herrmann offered Fisher a $3,650 salary for 1920, a raise of just $150 following the team’s championship season. An insulted Fisher, ready to quit the team, gave Herrmann an ultimatum, and the owner relented, boosting the pitcher’s compensation to a more respectable $5,500.

But Fisher was serious about looking for a new job, and when the Reds traveled to New York for a series against the Giants while the St. Louis Cardinals were across town to play the Brooklyn Dodgers, he introduced himself to Cardinals Manager Branch Rickey. “He was an amazing person,” Fisher recalled later. “Even though I didn’t know him . . . he knew all about my pitching and what I had done.” Rickey had recently recommended his former player Del Pratt for a coaching job at the University of Michigan, Rickey’s alma mater. When he learned that Fisher was also interested, Rickey put in a good word for him too.

Fisher finished out the season with the Reds, going 10–11 with a 2.73 ERA in 33 games. But when Herrmann was late in sending out his contract for 1921, and then tried to cut his salary by $1,000, Fisher had had enough. In spring training, Pratt stepped down as Michigan’s coach in order to return to the Major Leagues, and Fisher immediately applied for the job. He got permission from Reds Manager Pat Moran to travel to Ann Arbor for an interview. (Moran later refuted this claim, but it was widely reported in the newspapers at the time.)

The Reds were in dire need of dependable pitching, so Herrmann made a last-minute offer to restore Fisher’s salary to its 1920 level; Fisher countered by asking for a multi-year deal, which the Reds owner declined. Fisher reportedly ended their meeting by picking up the phone in Herrmann’s office and calling Michigan’s athletic director to accept the job on the spot.

Enter Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was a few months into his tenure as baseball’s first commissioner. He had been hired by the owners in November 1920 after the exposure of the Black Sox Scandal had rocked baseball and destroyed the credibility of the sport’s former governing body, the three-man National Commission chaired by none other than Garry Herrmann.

Landis needed Herrmann’s influential support as he began to establish his authority over the game. After Fisher took the job at Michigan, an infuriated Herrmann placed him on the “ineligible” list instead of the “voluntarily retired” list for breaching his contract. Fisher arranged a personal meeting with Landis to give his side of the story. But Landis backed up the Cincinnati boss—then notified Fisher that he was on the ineligible list permanently. He cited the fact that Fisher had only given his team seven days’ notice of his intention to quit instead of the 10 days that his contract required. He also was upset by newspaper reports that Fisher was negotiating to play with an outlaw team in Pennsylvania.

Fisher was a veteran pitcher who had competed with honor against the Black Sox in the 1919 World Series. But he now found himself on the sidelines along with them, never to play Major League Baseball again.

Fisher was not the only player in that era to abruptly quit playing baseball because of a salary dispute or a more lucrative job opportunity. Future Hall of Famer Frank “Home Run” Baker of the Philadelphia A’s had even sat out an entire season, forcing Manager Connie Mack to trade him to the Yankees. But no one could provide an adequate explanation for Fisher’s harsh punishment. Landis’s biographer, J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of The Sporting News, called it a case of “judicial caprice.” Indeed, Landis was notorious for his heavy-handed decisions in his previous career as a federal judge—most famously, a record-setting $29 million fine he levied against John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1907—and many of his judgments were reversed or thrown out by higher courts.

As baseball commissioner, Landis was the highest court. He had full authority to make decisions he felt were in the best interests of the game. Fisher, like the Black Sox players, had nowhere else to appeal.

What made Fisher’s situation unique is that Landis did show leniency to other players who had been banned for similar crimes. In 1922, the commissioner reinstated former Cleveland first baseman Joe Harris, who had been placed on the ineligible list when he turned down the Indians’ contract offer to play for the same outlaw team in Pennsylvania that had approached Fisher. Landis also allowed “Honest” Dickey Kerr—Fisher’s opponent in Game 3 of the 1919 World Series—to return to the White Sox in 1925 after his salary dispute with owner Charles Comiskey resulted in a three-year absence from organized baseball.

By then, Fisher was firmly entrenched as Michigan’s head baseball coach, a position he held for 38 years. He led the Wolverines to 14 Big Ten Conference titles and the College World Series championship in 1953, finishing his legendary career with a .694 winning percentage (661–292). About 20 of his players went on to play in the Major Leagues, including Charlie Gehringer and Dick Wakefield. As a freshman football coach and assistant basketball coach, Fisher also coached a young Gerald R. Ford and Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon. He also integrated Michigan’s baseball team two decades before Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers.

Fisher was showered with accolades after his retirement from coaching in 1958. He was elected to Michigan’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1959, and the university’s ballpark was renamed Ray Fisher Stadium in 1970.

Fisher remained on Major League Baseball’s official blacklist the entire time. But who could tell? Enforcement of his ban was almost nonexistent, especially after Judge Landis’s death in 1944. When the Milwaukee Braves (and later, the Detroit Tigers) asked him to be a pitching instructor during spring training in the 1960s, no one stopped him. Some years earlier, the MLB office had even mailed him a lifetime pass to attend games at any ballpark, a perk afforded to all players with at least 10 years of service.

In 1980, when the old coach was 93 years old, University of Michigan history professor Donald Proctor reexamined the circumstances of Fisher’s banishment and learned that he had never been properly reinstated. Many letters were sent to then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn, including one by President Ford, asking for Fisher’s name to be cleared. Kuhn responded, “We consider Mr. Fisher to be a retired player in good standing,” finally putting to rest an unjust punishment that had stood for six decades.

Fisher made his final public appearance in the summer of 1982, when he was honored at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers Day, along with Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and others. He was, at the time, the oldest living Yankee, the oldest living Red, and the oldest player who had appeared in a World Series. Fisher died in Ann Arbor three months later at the age of 95.