Out of the Park: Memoir of a Minor League Baseball All-Star (review)

As former ballplayers go, Ed Mickelson is not famous, except perhaps as the answer to a trivia question. His professional baseball career extended over eleven seasons and included three brief stays in the majors for a total of only eighteen games. More prominently, he enjoyed three All-Star years as a minor-league first baseman and played two fine seasons, 1955 and 1956, with the Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast League (PCL), batting better than .300 each time. After he retired, he got his master’s degree and spent more than four decades in secondary education, teaching, coaching, and counseling. He is also a faithful member of SABR’s Bob Broeg Chapter (St. Louis), and his friendship informs this review. And as for the trivia, he was the player who drove in the last run for the St. Louis Browns in a 2–1, eleven-inning loss to the Chicago White Sox on September 27, 1953.

Mickelson was born in 1926 in small-town Illinois, moved to Chicago in 1935 and St. Louis two years later. His high school did not have a baseball team until his senior year, so he played mostly football and basketball and even gave track a try. He played football at the University of Missouri in the fall of 1944 (including a 54–0 loss to Ohio State and Heisman Trophy–winner Les Horvath) and intended to play baseball in the spring, but he left school after just one semester to join the Army Air Corps. In the service, he played baseball for the team quartered at Scott Field in Illinois. He earned a baseball scholarship to Oklahoma A&M after the war, and he played basketball, too, for legendary coach Henry Iba. In the summer after his freshman year, he got a tryout with the St. Louis Cardinals that resulted in a minor-league contract with a fifteen-hundred-dollar bonus.

Mickelson’s professional career began in June 1947 in Decatur, Illinois, in the Class B Three-I League. The following spring, he reported to the Cardinals’ enormous minor-league complex in Daytona Beach and was assigned to Pocatello, Idaho, in the Class C Pioneer League. These Cardinals won the pennant, and Mickelson made the All-Star team, batting .372. In 1949, he was promoted to Columbus, Georgia, in the Class A South Atlantic League, but the next year he was back in Class B with Lynchburg, Virginia, in the Piedmont League. Despite leading the league in hitting during the season’s early weeks, he was demoted in May to Montgomery, Alabama, in the Southeastern League, also Class B, but a step lower. He made the All-Star team again and hit .417, good enough by far to win the batting title except for not having enough plate appearances.

Mickelson’s performance in Montgomery earned him a trip to St. Louis to finish the season with the parent club, but this became no more than the first of three disappointing promotions to the majors. He got into only five games and batted 1for 10. Disappointed with the contract offered him for 1951 and with his limited prospects in an organization ripe with first base-men, Mickelson fretted, stayed home in the spring, and finished a semester on his way to a degree at Washington University in St. Louis. In June, the Cardinals lent him to the Pittsburgh Pirates organization so that he could play for the New Orleans Pelicans in the Class AA Southern Association. Pittsburgh decided not to buy his contract, so in 1952 his peripatetic journey continued as he was shuttled to three St. Louis farms, Houston, Columbus (Ohio), and Rochester.

Over the winter, the Cardinals sold Mickelson’s contract to the St. Louis Browns, and he went to Riverside, California, for spring training. There he met manager Marty Marion and the players who would help bring down the curtain on American League baseball in St. Louis: Bob Cain...