An Interview with Ted Lyons, White Sox Hall of Fame Pitcher

Lyons showing off the knuckleball grip

Ted Lyons pitched 21 years (1923-1946) for the Chicago White Sox, won 260 games, and never came close to a World Series.

Seventy-four percent of his starts were complete games. He pitched against Ty Cobb and Ted Williams, and during the entire career of Jimmy Foxx.

Elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955, he was one of the most popular players in baseball and had a lively sense of humor. Lyons managed the White Sox from 1946-1948, then coached for five years at Detroit and one in Brooklyn.

A bachelor, he lived most of his life in the house in Vinton, Louisiana, where we spent an afternoon with him on July 19, 1985. - Norman L. Macht

Ted Lyons Time at Baylor

I was pitching semi-pro ball in Louisiana in 1919 when Connie Mack sent a scout to sign me. I told him I was going to Baylor in the fall.

Mr. Mack sent another fellow to see me at Baylor who offered to pay for part of my schooling and give me a bonus.

I liked the Athletics but I didn’t sign. Ten years later Mack asked all our White Sox pitchers to come to Philadelphia and brief his pitchers on the Cubs, who they were going to play in the World Series.

We played a city series against the Cubs every year. I walked in and Mr. Mack said, “See, young fellow. If you’d signed with us, you’d be on a pennant winner.”

I told him, “Mr. Mack, I could be out in Podunk or somewhere. With all these boys you have, I would have had a hard time breaking in there.” He said, “I would’ve found a place for you.”

My last spring at Baylor --1923, the White Sox were training in Seguin, Texas, about thirty miles away. Their catcher, Ray “Cracker” Schalk, came over with three newspapermen just for a story.

They said, “Hey, Cracker, why don’t you warm up one of the Baylor pitchers?”

My coach called me over. “Hey, Amar” – my middle name – “come over here. He introduced me to Schalk and that was a big thrill for me. “I want you to throw some to Mr. Schalk.”

I put all I had on the pitches, popping his mitt. That evening he called his boss and said, “I just warmed up a kid at Baylor. You better sign him. He’s going all the way.”

Signing with the Chicago White Sox

The White Sox needed pitchers. They’d lost some good ones from the Black Sox scandal. I signed with them and joined them right after graduation.

The first major league game I ever saw I pitched in – one inning. The last week of the season I relieved in the first game of a doubleheader at Cleveland. We scored four in the ninth and won.

In the second game, the manager, Kid Gleason, said, “Hey kid, go down and warm up.” He never did know my name. I pitched four or five innings and won that game, too.

The White Sox and Giants toured Europe in 1924. I got to shake hands with the Duke of York.

We played a game in Ireland at noon on a Sunday and there were 28 people in the stands. The rest were all in church.

Pitching the entire game

You were expected to pitch the whole game in those days. And you fought being taken out. I was pitching against Lefty Grove and the Athletics one day.

In the first inning, Al Simmons hit a grand slam before I could get anybody out. The manager, Ray Schalk, came out to take me out. I said, “I ain’t going.”

He said, “You don’t want to waste eight good innings of pitching.”

“Make that nine innings, skipper. I haven’t got anybody out yet. I’m not going. You’ll have to get the police out here to get me out. I’m going to stay out here and beat Grove.”

I got back up on the mound and wondered what I had committed myself to. Well, they got just two more hits off me and Fats Fothergill and Lew Fonseca hit home runs in the eighth and ninth innings and we beat them, 6-4.

I don’t know how fast Grove was; they never measured it.  He was faster than I was, and my fastball was probably in the low 90s. 

Legendary pitcher Ted Lyons

One day we got two men on base against him in the ninth inning and Butch Henline was sent up to pinch hit. Grove got two strikes on him and Butch was a little afraid of a duster.

But Grove just threw the next pitch right by him and Henline gave it a half-hearted wave.

He came back to the bench and I said, “Hey, Butch, that’s the first time I ever saw that guy throw a change of pace with two strikes on a hitter.”

Butch said, “Change of pace? It looked more like an aspirin tablet to me.”

I brushed back hitters by throwing at their feet. Made them skip rope.

Jimmy Foxx was the only one it was bad to pitch to above the belt. Comiskey Park had a big outfield, so throwing the ball up and letting them hit it was usually okay. But not with Fox.

He had those big arms and wore short cut-off sleeves. One day I asked him, “How much air do you put in those arms?” He said, “Thirty-five pounds.”

Pitching to the Babe

Pitching to Ruth, you had to throw some fastballs, but only where he couldn’t reach them, and try to get him out with slow stuff. It didn’t always work.

When they built the second deck on Comiskey Park, the architect said nobody would ever hit a ball out of there. I told him to wait until the Yankees came to town. First time in, Ruth hit one over the roof.

Babe didn’t know you unless you were in your position on the field. One year he picked me on his All-Star team for the newspapers.

One day in Yankee Stadium he was in right field shagging flies.  I walked out and shook hands with him and thanked him for picking me.

He said, “That’s okay, kid.” Walking back to the bench, he said to somebody, “Who’s that number sixteen, anyhow?”

Ted Williams was always learning, watching everything. He was too choosy.

We were in the marines together during the war and I told him, “If you’d hit like DiMaggio, be more aggressive and hit those balls just a little off the plate, you’d hit .400 every year.” But he wouldn’t.

I was rooming with another pitcher, Sloppy Thurston, one year when Johnny Neun came up with Detroit.

In a pre-game meeting, we asked a couple pitchers who had faced Neun in the minors how they pitched to him. “Low and outside,” they said.

Thurston said, “What did he hit?”

“.384.”

“We’ll pitch him high and inside,” Sloppy said.

I was a switch-hitter. One day in St. Louis I hit two doubles in one inning, one left-handed and one right-handed. 

I had one superstition: I would never step across the baseline with my right foot, always the left.

In 1935 I was rooming with pitcher George Earnshaw, a night owl. One morning at 7 the phone rang. I heard George say, “What for, Jim?” It was the manager, Jimmie Dykes, wanting to see him.

When he came back to the room, he said, “” I’m going to Brooklyn.” The press got hold of him, asked him what he thought about going to the Dodgers. George said, “”Just tell ‘em I have but one arm to give to the National League.”

A great relationship with Jimmie Dykes

I would have been happy if Jimmie Dykes had stayed the White Sox manager forever.

We finished third five or six times and usually had a good club in the 1930s, but we always seemed to get hurt by key injuries. The press was always putting us down anyhow.

The Cubs were the hot team in Chicago.

I played for nine managers and he was the best. Everybody liked him, even after he cussed them out or fined them for something.

Dykes used to smoke cigars between innings during a game. He’d smoke a short one if his pitcher had good control, If his pitcher was wild, he’d light up a long one, cause it would be a long game. 

One day Zeke Bonura was playing first base for us and stole home in the fifteenth inning to win the game. But he pulled a muscle doing it.

He couldn’t play the next day, so he climbed about 35 steps up to the radio booth to watch the game.

Dykes went into the clubhouse after a cigar, and he heard a familiar voice on the radio saying, “There goes that train to New Orleans and I wish I was on it.”

Dykes wrote him a note and sent it up to the radio booth: “Listen, Bananas, if you don’t get down here and play first base, you’re going to be on that train.”

When Dykes was fired – or quit -- early in the ’46 season, I didn’t want the job. I wanted him to stay. He told me the situation got so he wasn’t going to stay anyhow.

The morning I replaced him he had breakfast with me and told me all he knew about the team.

He said, “You’ve played with these guys, but there’s a lot you don’t know about them. I don’t know whether to congratulate you or sympathize with you.”

[The White Sox finished 7th, 6th and 8th in the eight-team American League during his years as manager. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955 and died in 1986.]