Baseball great Frosty Kennedy played with Plainview Ponies
Posted: Saturday, September 22, 2012 2:25 pm
Updated: 2:26 pm, Sat Sep 22, 2012.
Baseball great Frosty Kennedy played with Plainview Ponies DOUG McDONOUGH
Herald Editor Plainview Herald
Without a lick of modesty, Forrest Kennedy always considered himself the greatest professional baseball player in the history of the sport.
And “Frosty” Kennedy considered his best season to be 1956, when he hammered 60 home runs and drove in an astounding 184 runs while playing for the Plainview Ponies in the Class D Southwestern League.
In recognition of that historic feat, Kennedy is part of a display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Kennedy, who died June 5, 1998, at the age of 72, looked back at his baseball career for a feature in the Herald on Aug. 25, 1985. Then-Editor Danny Andrews updated that story in 1992, when then-66-year-old Kennedy was operating a BMX bicycle track in Covina, Calif. Although retired, he was still living in Covina when he died six years later.
“I think I’m the greatest ballplayer ever,” he told Andrews in a telephone interview in 1985. “Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, but never batted over .400. Ted Williams and a lot of other guys batted over .400, but never hit 60 homers. I did both.”
Pointing out that fact, Kennedy told Andrews that the personalized plates on his car read “60 HOMERS.”
A retiree from Douglass Aircraft and a lifelong fan, Kennedy in his later years held the firm conviction that half of the modern major league ballplayers couldn’t have played for the Plainview Ponies and other semi-pro and minor league teams during the 1940s and 1950s.
“It’s true, the kids don’t have the experience,” he told Andrews. “They play college ball and maybe spend a year or two in the minors, and they move up to the big leagues. There are only six guys hitting over .300 in each league.
“(Yankees great) Reggie Jackson couldn’t have played on my ball club. They just don’t have players now like Musial, Williams and DiMaggio. A guy is hitting .250 and they think he’s having a helluva year,” he said.
While he hit 60 homers for Plainview, Kennedy was quoted as claiming that he could have hit 120 homers if he had played in a well-lighted modern park.
“We only had five pitchers on the staff and they were paid to go nine innings,” Kennedy explained. “Now they think a guy’s great if he goes five.”
A first baseman, according to Baseball-Reference.com, Kennedy played for a dozen teams during his 11-year career.
Kennedy said one reason he never made it to the major leagues despite a career .342 batting average with 228 home runs, 1,083 runs batted in and 1,572 hits, was “there were too many players. In those days, the Dodgers had more players in the farm system than there are in the entire minor leagues now.”
Signed for $200 per month by former Dodger catcher Babe Hermann, as a 21-year-old he played one game in the 1947 season for Riverside, Calif., recording a hit in his single appearance at the plate. The next two years at Riverside he hit .331 and .411. In 1950, Kennedy played for three teams, Pensacola, Fla., Atlanta, Ga., and Hartford, Conn., during an injury-plagued year, playing a total of 48 games with a combined batting average of .320.
He hit .307 with Miami Beach in 1951; .339 with 25 homers at Lamesa in 1952; a league-leading .410 including a 40-game hitting streak, 225 hits, 38 home runs and 169 RBI for Plainview in 1953; played briefly for Oklahoma City and Burlington, Iowa, before hitting .372 with 35 homers and 120 RBI in 112 games for Amarillo in 1954; hit .301 with 30 homers and 122 RBI with Yuma, Ariz., in 1955; .327 with 60 homers and 184 RBI in Plainview in 1956; and finished his career in 1957 playing for Boise, Idaho, (19 games with 15 hits and one homer) and Savannah, Ga., (34 games with 28 hits and six honors).
“Grover Seitz (the Pampa manager who was to have managed the Ponies in 1957, but died in a car crash in the off-season) wanted me to come back and play, but in 1957 I signed with Savannah in the Cincinnati organization and got a new car as a bonus. I had a hernia operation and they sold me to Jacksonville, and I wound up with Boise in the Pioneer League.”
After retiring as a player, Kennedy went on to coach American Legion youth baseball for eight years.
Kennedy recalled that he and second baseman Don Stokes were sold to Oklahoma City, an AA team, after the Lamesa franchise was moved to Plainview at the start of the 1953 season, and that’s how he wound up in Plainview. He hit a league-leading .410 that season, and spent the next two seasons playing for Amarillo, Burlington, Oklahoma City and Yuma, before coming back to Plainview for his historic 1956 season.
According to Baseball-Reference.com, Kennedy pitched in only three games. He pitched in two games for Amarillo in the 1954 season and once in 1956 for Plainview. None of those assignments carried enough innings to register a win-loss decision.
According to Andrews, Kennedy was a colorful character with a proverbial chaw of tobacco, muscular build and sleeveless, tobacco-stained uniform.
As the 1956 season wound down, Plainview was well out of the Class C pennant race. The locally-owned Ponies, who did not have a working agreement with a major league team, were 75-69 and finished 17 games behind Hobbs. Also in the league were El Paso, Pampa, San Angelo, Ballinger, Carlsbad, Midland, Roswell and Clovis.
But Kennedy was flirting with history, gunning for 60 homers. Babe Ruth set the major league record in 1927 for the Yankees. Joe Baumann held the overall record with 72 homers while playing for Roswell in 1954.
Kennedy had 59 homers going into the final three games in 1956 at San Angelo. Many of those round-trippers were hit in Plainview’s Jaycee Park where it was only 348 feet to the center field fence.
A rainout in San Angelo forced a pair of 7-inning games in a double-header the next night, depriving Kennedy of at least two at-bats.
“The San Angelo catcher was calling the pitches for me, trying to help me get the 60th homer,” but Kennedy went 1-for-8 with nothing out of the park. “I was trying too hard and I finally told him, ‘Hey, you’re not helping me, you’re hurting me.’ I didn’t want to know what was coming.”
But the next night, the last of the season, Kennedy hit a long solo homer in the third off Jorge Lopez. Umpire Al Martin ruled it fair as it soared right at the foul line.
Kennedy said one of his most memorable homers came in 1953 when he hit one off Red Dial of Clovis in the 13th inning of a playoff game at Jaycee Park. Kennedy collected $290 in bills that fans stuck through the fence behind home plate.
Decades later, Kennedy had fond memories of Plainview, saying it was his favorite baseball city and had the best fans. It also was “the only town I ever played in where you were ‘sanded out’ because the sand blew so hard you couldn’t see the lights.”
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