William John Pogdel ( born William John Posedel , August 2, 1906 , San Francisco , California - November 28, 1989 , Livermore , California ) - American baseball player , pitcher . He played in the Major League Baseball for Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves .
| Bill turned gray | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 | |||
| Pitcher | |||
| |||
| Personal data | |||
| Date of Birth | August 2, 1906 | ||
| Place of Birth | San Francisco , California , USA | ||
| Date of death | November 28, 1989 ( 83) | ||
| Place of death | Livermore , California , USA | ||
| Professional debut | |||
| April 23, 1938 for the Brooklyn Dodgers | |||
| Selected Statistics | |||
| Wins / losses | 41–43 | ||
| ERA | 4,56 | ||
| Strikeouts | 227 | ||
| Saves | 6 | ||
| Teams | |||
| |||
| Awards and Achievements | |||
| |||
After completing a gaming career for forty years, he worked as a coach and scout in a number of Major League Baseball clubs. In 1972, he was part of the Oakland Athletics coaching staff who won the World Series .
Content
Biography
The early years
Bill Gray turned born on August 2, 1906 in San Francisco. His parents, Joseph and Johann, moved to the United States from Austria-Hungary in 1901. He was the third of six children in the family. At birth, he received the name Wilhelm Johann, but then, during the First World War , it was transformed into William John. Josef at that time worked as a riveter at the shipyard in Vallejo . Bill studied at St. Vincent High School and his main hobbies in childhood were baseball and ships. [1]
After school, he went to serve in the Navy , but he did not give up sports there either. While serving in the Pacific, Bill won the division championship as part of the Saratoga aircraft carrier team. After spending four years on ships, he retired to the reserve in 1929. In Los Angeles, Grey met the Portland Beavers team catcher Tony Rego , who invited him to practice. Bill impressed the club's coach and on August 3 signed a contract with Beavers. In the championship of the Pacific Coast League in 1929, he spent seventeen innings on the field with an ERA transmittance of 2.65 [1] .
Minor Leagues
He began the 1930 season at Portland, but played unsuccessfully. As Posedel himself later said: “I didn’t even know how to stand on a pitcher hill.” Bill was sent to the Pueblo Braves A-League team. There he spent the rest of the season, in ninety-five innings showing a transmittance of 5.12 [1] .
In Pueblo, for his naval past, he received from the journalists the nicknames “Sailor Bill”, “Duck Bill” and “Porthole”. Gray turned to the idea of ending his career and going to work at the shipyard in Vallejo, like his father. In the 1931 season, he spent one hundred thirty-one innings on the field with a transmittance of 5.12. After that, the Beavers exchanged Bill for Wichita Aviators . From there, he almost immediately moved to the Tulsa Oilers [1] .
He played for Tulsa from 1932 to 1935. In his first season at the Oilers, he scored sixteen wins with ten defeats and helped the team win the Western League championship. Under the leadership of former Major League Baseball player Art Griggs , Bill progressed. In 1934, he spent two hundred and seventy innings on the field and won fifteen victories. In June 1935, he was exchanged back to Portland [1] .
As part of the Beavers, Bill played until 1937. In the 1936 season, he won twenty victories and took sixth place among all pitchers of the league by this indicator. A successful performance attracted the attention of the Cincinnati Reds club, who offered Gray a trial contract. At the pre-season training camp, thirty-year-old Bill competed for a place in the roster with young talent Johnny Vander Mer and experienced Dick Barrett . In the course of the training camp, Posedel had pains in his hand, and he also felt uncomfortable away from home. The Cincinnati leadership agreed to let him go back to Portland [1] .
As part of Beavers Bill, he had a good season, setting personal records for the number of innings (300) and victories (21) spent on the field. After that, on the recommendation of scout Ted McGrew, the contract turned gray was bought by the Brooklyn Dodgers club for 10 thousand dollars and two players [1] .
Major League Baseball
On April 23, 1938, Gray turned his debut in Major League Baseball. He replaced the third inning of the game against the New York Giants , conceded just three hits in 5 1/3 of the inning, but was defeated. Bill was let down by the weak play of the team in defense. He won the first victory a month later. Since June, he began to enter the field as the team's starting pitcher. Championship turned gray unevenly. In one hundred and forty innings, he scored eight wins with nine defeats. His ERA transmittance of 5.66 was the worst among all league pitchers who have played at least a hundred innings. In addition, on the last day of the season, Bill broke his jaw during a warm-up [1] .
In one of the trainings, Bill had a fight with team veteran Leo Derosher , who in 1939 became the head coach of the Dodgers. The tension between them became even greater and on March 31, they turned gray in the Boston Beas for catcher Al Todd [1] .
Boston head coach Casey Stengel regarded Bill as one of the veterans, despite the fact that he spent only the second season in Major League Baseball. In the offseason, Posedel expanded his arsenal of innings, adding fastball and a heavily twisted cervball , a changer up and a slower twisted innings. On the opening day of the season, he replaced and brought the team a victory over Philadelphia in twelve innings with a score of 7: 6 [1] .
Since May 1, Stengel transferred Bill to the starting rotation of the pitchers. Gray became one of the discoveries of the season, having spent sixteen full games and gained fourteen victories over the next four months. The best game of his career came to this period - a one-hit dry match against Pittsburgh Pirates . The last four starts in the championship, he lost due to accumulated fatigue. Boston took seventh place [1] .
The team showed the same result in the 1940 season. Bill became the best Bis pitcher in terms of the number of starts, victories and full games. In June, playing with the Pirates, he set a personal record by making eleven strikeouts. Unlike last year, the championship turned gray with six wins in ten games [1] .
In the spring of 1941, Gray turned to be the team's oldest pitcher. In the offseason, he spent a month at Hot Springs in Arkansas . In the first two weeks of the season, Bill was released from the games taking place in cold weather in the north-east of the country. Then he won two victories in two full games. After a successful start, his hand began to bother him again, and later pain in his leg appeared. Due to injuries, Posedel spent only 57 2/3 of the inning on the field [1] .
In December, the Japanese fleet attacked Pearl Harbor . In January 1942, Bill again joined the Navy. He spent most of the war as commander of artillery teams on merchant ships throughout the Pacific Ocean. After spending another four years in the service, Gray turned into a reserve on August 30, 1945 [1] .
In the spring of 1946, the leadership of Boston, which changed its name to Braves, invited Bill to pre-season training camps. He was thirty-nine years old and the head coach of the team, Billy Southworth, invited him to try his hand as a coach. During training matches, Posedel worked with first base players. In the regular season, he played only in nineteen matches, playing the role of a mentor for young pitchers in the team [1] .
At the end of the year, he planned to end his career as a player and continue to work in baseball as an empire . An offer from the Seattle Rainers club made him change his mind. Bill spent one hundred and thirty-one inning in the Pacific Coast League Championship, scoring twelve wins. At The Rainiers, Posdel also served as coach of the pitchers. After the end of the 1946 season, he announced the end of performances [1] .
After speaking,
In 1948, the Pittsburgh Pirates hired Bill as a scout in the Rocky Mountains region . For the next forty years, Posedel worked in various Major League Baseball teams as a coach for pitchers and scout. At Pirates, he helped advance the careers of Bob Friend and Verne Lowe . In 1957, he briefly served as the head coach of Portland Beavers [1] .
In 1962, Bill took over as a scout at Kansas City Athletics . At the club, he also engaged in organizing work with pitchers. With him, the team came the future stars of the league Catfish Hunter and Blue Moon Odom . In 1972, Posdel became a member of the coaching staff of the team that won the World Series . Even before the start of the championship, he announced his intention to retire, but then changed his mind and coached pitchers for another year in one of the farm clubs [1] .
In 1974, his close friend John McNamara , who led the San Diego Padres , persuaded Bill to postpone his resignation for another season. The coaching staff of the team turned gray after the championship ended, but until the end of the 1970s he advised the Padres management on issues related to pitchers [1] .
In the last years of his life, Bill lived in San Leandro with his second wife, Della, and daughter. The first time he married in 1933 and divorced his wife in 1940. He spent several years in a wheelchair [1] .
Bill Turned Gray passed away on November 28, 1989 in Livermore. The cause of death was colon cancer. His body was cremated, the dust was scattered over the sea [1] .
In 2006, for his services, Bill was elected to the Vallejo Sports Hall of Fame [1] .
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Wolf, Gregory H. Bill Posedel (English) . sabr.org . Society for American Baseball Research. Date of treatment May 16, 2019. Archived on September 13, 2015.