1960 AMERICAN LEAGUE ALL-STAR
"One of the pleasant late-season surprises of 1959 was the pitching performance of tall Jim Coates, the 27-year-old rookie fireballer. Big Jim, a reliever most of the year, was spectacular when he got a chance as a starter and closed with six victories and an earned run mark of 2.97.
A native of Farnham, VA, Jim began with Olean in 1952. He received additional schooling at Joplin, Binghamton, Norfolk, Birmingham and Richmond. Now that he has proved that he can win with the Yankees after two previous trials, Jim looms large in the '60 picture."
-Don Schiffer, 1960 Mutual Baseball Annual
"Most experts predict that pitching will be the key to whatever success the Yankees may achieve in 1960. One of the major reasons for optimism over Yankee pitching prospects is the anticipated 'arrival' of Jim Coates.
Coates has been a Bomber mound prospect of the first order for several years. Major injuries prevented his expected big league development until last year. Then he was brought along slowly to assure a strong arm and the development of a curve and change-up go with his fine fast ball. He won his last four decisions of 1959 to post a 6-1 record and an impressive 2.88 ERA.
Back in his freshman year of 1952, lanky Jim fanned 223 in 226 innings. Now after a long period of development, it looks like the 27-year-old from the quaint-sounding town of Village, Virginia, finally is going to make it. His strongest booster is his tutor, pitching coach Ed Lopat."
-The New York Yankees Official 1960 Yearbook
James Alton Coates (P) #39
Born August 4, 1932 in Farnham, Virginia, resides in Village, Va. Height: 6-4, weight: 180. Bats right, throws right. Married and father of one boy, James Alton, Jr. (1 1/2), and one girl, Jane Leigh (6 months).
-The New York Yankees Official 1960 Yearbook
"Jim Coates was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal Yankee picture last season, his first in the American League.
The 6'4" righty had a 6-1 record for New York and his ERA was a fine 2.88 in the 100 innings he worked. His control was good with 64 strikeouts more than offsetting the 36 walks issued by the 180-pound Virginian.
Coates broke into Organized Ball with Olean in 1952 and worked his through the Yankee chain with stops at Joplin, Binghamton, Norfolk, Birmingham and Richmond. He had a 'cup of coffee with New York in 1956, working two innings in an unimpressive fashion.
At Richmond in 1957 and 1958, he turned in ERAs of 2.63 and .2.79, respectively. The latter season saw him appearing in only eight contests because of arm trouble. However, he showed last season that the miseries are no longer in his soup bone and certainly rates as one of the key men in the Bronx Bombers' pitching setup for the current campaign.
Jim is married and has two children. The Coates make their off-season home in Village, Va."
-New York Yankees 1960 Yearbook (Jay Publishing Co.)
"Jim hopes to duplicate his first-half performance during the last half of the 1960 season. He ran his winning streak to 13 games (four from last year and nine in a row this season) before losing to Boston.
The 6'4" right-hander from the quaint-sounding community of Village, Va., has been a Yankee prospect since 1952. Injuries have hindered his development but he's been a winner this year and hopes to contribute a Yankee pennant in October."
-1960 New York Yankees Official Program and Scorecard
THE ANGRY SUCCESS
"Jim Coates lost a game in May, 1959. "Eleventh inning ... I was throwing relief against Cleveland, two out. I passed Colavito because first base was open. Then Power hit a home run. Second pitch. Inside fast ball.'
It was more than a year later and the Virginian with a hawk-like nose and deep-set grey-blue eyes hadn't lost a game since then, four straight in the remainder of the 1959 season and, at the moment when he was sitting in the lounge of the Yankee Stadium clubhouse, nine more in a row.
For a change, Coates wasn't mad at anyone. Jim admits that once upon a time he was baseball's angriest young man. Even now, when to his own surprise everything seems to be rolling in his favor, he gets mad once in a while. In a recent game a batter rolled to the box. Jim leaped on the ball with his gloved hand and when he tried to take it out of the glove it stuck in the webbing. Whereupon Jim finally extricated it and banged it on the ground. This was a surprising display of temper for a pitcher who has made good at the relatively old age of 28.
One might be able to trace the causes of Jim's rages to certain events in his past. For example, Jim was the township hero in Farnham, a hamlet not far from the mouth of the Potomac River. He had been unbeatable as a soft-ball pitcher, and he wasn't easy to hit as a semipro hard-ball flinger. A 19-year-old kid gets the idea that he has the world licked after he tosses a few low-hit games, and hears the townsfolk cheer him and big league scouts come around to look him over and sign him up.
Well, suh, none other than the Yankees got him to put his signature to a contract. Off he went in the spring of 1952 to Olean, N.Y., in the Pony League. He threw as hard up there as down home, but the difference was that the pros didn't swing at his wild stuff. They waited and waited and waited.
Jim walked the first batter on four pitches. He walked the second batter on four pitches, and the third batter, and the fourth- and the manager, Right Fielder Bunny Mick, came over to the box. He turned to Jim's catcher, whose name Jim forgets. 'Move your target a few feet from the plate,' he said. 'Maybe Coates can't see you too good and will fool us and throw a strike.'
Coates walked the next two batters on eight pitches. He was getting mad, not at Bunny Mick, but at himself. There was quite a crowd in the ball park, and they were hooting him. Mick called time.
'Take me out!' Jim demanded. 'I don't have it today.'
'Well, you might as well find it today as next week,' Mick told him. 'You're going to pitch until you get them out.'
Jim walked 13 batters in that horrible inning. He walked 17 before the game ended, proving that he regained a little control later on.
'I couldn't sleep that night,' Jim says. 'I still hate Mick for doing that to me. I don't blame the batters for waiting. They wanted to swing, but some of my pitches were four feet away from the plate. It was my fault, I suppose.'
Jim could throw hard. He was hard-muscled, lean and always in fine physical condition. He worked wintertimes as a lumberjack in the woods around Northumberland County, felling pine trees that were reduced to shavings for excelsior. He had himself a gun and some rabbit and bird dogs, and he spent his spare time in off-seasons shooting quail, hare, deer and wild ducks.
The Yankees didn't give up on him. They kept him on their minor league list, Norfolk to Joplin to Binghamton to Norfolk again. Jim kept getting madder and madder. It wasn't the bus trips or the long summers in small towns. He was mad at himself because he handed 161 bases on balls out in Joplin. He just couldn't get his ball over the plate. Moreover, every time the Yankees would move him up a link in their chain, he'd pitch 'something awful.' It would be the opening game of the season in Binghamton and the other team would make seven runs in one inning, four on bases on balls.
'I was fetchin' to quit in '55, when the same thing happened, a wallopin'. But I was playing for Birmingham in the Southern Association then and the manager, Phil Page, really began to show me somethin' about the curve and change-up. So they moved me back to Binghamton, and I had a real good season.' Jim's record was 13-8, with an impressive 2.77 ERA.
'So they sent me up to Richmond in AAA ball in '56, and there I met Eddie Lopat,' says Jim, and his face lights up as he talks about the one-time Yankee Junkman. Like Larry Sherry, of the Dodger organization, Coates had been ticketed as a wild man with a temper. Lopat went to work on the temper first.
'There's no use blowing up when you put men on bases,' Lopat told Jim. Eddie was then managing Richmond. When Jim's control wavered, or batters began to tee off on his fastball, Eddie, unlike Bunny Mick, would call time for the purpose of speaking soothing words to his over-tense young pitcher.
'Besides,' says Jim, 'Eddie began to tinker with my stride. He shortened it. He made me put more weight on my left foot so that I couldn't bring up my left knee in front of my face. As I reared back, I could see the plate plain as anything and my control got better.
'And he kept tellin' me to put that curve over for strikes. What I mean is, a pitcher that can throw a curve with a two-and-one or three-or-two count can be a winning pitcher. So my catcher at Richmond would call for a curve when I was behind, and now and then I got my man on it. It sure was fun.'
Well, suh, Jim Coates was getting older, and although he didn't do so well at Richmond in 1956, a dismal 6-12, the Yankees brought him up to New York for a look-see. Casey Stengel's experts look and saw, and sent Jim back to Richmond for 1957.
By that time, he was boiling again. Richmond was down home in Virginia and no more than 50 miles away from those woods and home-cooking. But Jim, to his surprise, had it that year, 'it' being control. He led the International League in strikeouts with 161, yielding only 86 passes- a statistic which is of vital importance, for a two-to-one balance of strikeouts over walks over walks is a major league pace.
Jim apparently was ready for a real trial with the New Yorkers. He had a curve now, a change-of-pace, and that really good fast ball. His tutors decided that something more was needed.
'They gave me a slider, and in training camp at St. Petersburg in 1958, I worked and worked on it. It was a Thursday in Richmond that May. The team was going to Columbus the next day and they told me I'd pitch batting practice there. I never did.'
Jim was sort of warming up in the bullpen when something went snap in his elbow. He blames it on the slider. Whatever the cause, his arm began to 'ache something horrible.' He couldn't lift his arm. The club physician examined it and decided that immobilization was needed and Jim wore a cast for 18 days.
On the 18th day, the cast was removed, but the arm was no better. Jim was handed a ticket to New York and rushed to the Stadium. Dr. Sidney Gaynor, the Yankee physician and an orthopedic specialist, took X-rays.
'They didn't show anything,' Jim says. 'No one knew what the matter was. It wasn't bone chips or arthritis or anything like that. Dr. Gaynor told me to lay off for two months. In August I came back and pitched a little relief. All that winter I took hot water treatments and then exercised my arm. Casey Stengel told me to take things easy in 1959 spring training- and not to throw that slider, if my life depended on it.'
While the Yankees were in spring training that spring, your correspondent interviewed Johnny Johnson, minor league supervisor, about likely rookies in the Yankee chain. 'Coates?' said Johnson. 'He could be a great pitcher, but he had a bad sore arm last season.'
Well, suh, it was another year and the arm ached no longer. The Yankee pitching staff wasn't doing so well in 1959, what with Bob Turley losing and Whitey Ford getting his knocks. Jim Coates was kept. He worked relief in a few lost games and managed to rescue one. Cleveland defeated him. He was mad at the world that night. Think of it- his eighth season of organized ball and he wasn't getting anywhere. His name surely was on the cut-down list. He wouldn't last longer than June 15.
It was about time for the angry young man's luck to change. By one of those mysterious acts of fate, the Yankees began to score runs behind him like mad. He won four more games before the season ended, for a 6-1 record, 2.88 ERA. He even won two complete games, among the 37 in which he appeared.
Casey Stengel won't admit it, but one of his cardinal rules is to stick with the hot players, those who have been doing the most for him at any given moment. Jim Coates didn't necessarily fit into that category last spring. Eddie Lopat, promoted to pitching coach of the Bronxites, frankly admitted that he wasn't satisfied with Jim's curve. Jim had long overcome his panic when the curve went astray. He was able to use it in early season starts because it cut the plate at critical moments.
This was a gain but Jim might not be the subject of this profile if his mates hadn't backed him up with anywhere from 11 to 15 runs per game. He was a winner, but no one knew whether he had it, or just was a lucky stiff.
The first test came in an important series with the White Sox early in June, when he beat the South Siders with four hits in a close game. He repeated his flash of ace right-hand form against the Kansas City A's, yielding six hits, one a home run.
'He's getting better,' Lopat said, 'but it isn't all that. You pitch with a 15-run lead and you can't help letting up now and then. It's human nature. You say the hell with it, let 'em hit it. But winning a close game helps. There's no tonic like winning.'
Jim's fast ball moves, takes off, sinks, hops, goes to one side, gives hitters the jitters. 'The big kick is when I curve 'em silly at three-and-two,' he boasts.
James Alton Coates never had it so good. His maw and paw separated when he was a tiny tot, and he lived with his maw and his grandpaw. He lived in an off-Main Street area of these United States, where outsiders seldom come, and life goes on as it has gone on pretty much the same since John Smith wandered around the neighborhood looking behind trees for Indians, and finally getting acquainted with Pocahontas. Folks down that-a-way are country folks with pride and dignity, and there's nothing Jim would like better than to be the best pitcher north and south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Just now Jim is living up north in a rented house in Hackensack, N.J. His wife, Ruby Ann Sullivan, was a town girl Jim courted a bit when he was the town hero; he met her again when he had that good season at Richmond, and they got married. Now there's Jim, Jr., who will be a little leaguer some day, and baby Leigh, who is a girl with a name which is pronounced like Robert E.'s.
'It took a long time, on a doggone long road,' says Jim, Sr., who isn't very angry anymore."
-Charles Dexter, Baseball Digest, September 1960
"This has been a paradoxical season for lanky Jim Coates. Winner of his first nine games, he was a primary reason for the Yankees' strong early showing. Yet his earned run average was high and he was hit hard on occasion.
After a brief bout with illness, Jim came back strong with clutch performances as a starter and reliever. In nearly two complete seasons he won 18 and lost only four games."
-1960 World Series Official Souvenir Program
No comments:
Post a Comment