Yankees Mag: Most Valuable Mensch

Jimmie Reese’s fungo bat ought to have had a U.S. patent. Among the many ways he is remembered from a full and rich baseball life, Reese was known as one of the game’s great virtuosos with a fungo bat. Handcrafted in his Southern California home woodshop, his bats, with the end of the barrel partly sawed off, were a signature Reese creation -- something even more unique than the wooden picture frames he’d make for his legion of friends around the game.

“It was flat, so he could pop a baseball up to himself,” says Yankees manager Aaron Boone, adding that Reese’s uncanny accuracy at hitting any type of grounder or fly to a fielder was “just amazing.”

Boone saw it firsthand, beginning as a 10-year-old kid, fielding fungoes from Reese before games at Anaheim Stadium, where his father, Bob Boone, was a catcher for the California Angels from 1982 to ’88. A member of the Angels’ coaching staff during the Boones’ time in Anaheim, Reese was already in his 80s.

“He just loved the game, loved being around the game, loved contributing,” says Boone. “Just a kind, kind man.”

With the Angels, Reese was so beloved that Nolan Ryan named his son after him.

“In a world that lacks gentlemen, he was one,” former Angels skipper Joe Maddon says affectionately of Reese, who, when he died in 1994 at age 92, was still listed among the Angels’ coaches. “He’d check in daily, look you right in the eyeballs when he spoke to you -- he had this 1930s way of talking.

“Jimmie was loved by everybody.”

And if you were around the Angels in those days, Reese was as familiar a figure as the Big A sign outside the stadium, a genial octogenarian in uniform No. 50 with the famous fungo bat and an endless trove of stories about his early days as a Yankees infielder. It was well known that Reese roomed with Babe Ruth.

Or, as he liked to joke, he roomed with Ruth’s suitcase.

Everyone loved that story, one of many that Reese recalled when he was prompted to regale the younger generation about his time with The Babe. Yet, almost no one knew anything of Reese’s personal background, his family history or the fact that in New York City -- home to the world’s largest Jewish community -- Reese was the first Yankee of significance with a Jewish heritage.

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There had been one Jewish player in Yankees history before Reese. Born in New York City in 1882, Phil Cooney was a left-handed-hitting third baseman who played exactly one game -- consisting of three plate appearances -- for the 1905 New York Highlanders.

Cooney’s actual last name was Cohen, and Reese -- born Hyman Solomon in 1901 -- would also adopt an Irish surname during an era when that was common in the sports and entertainment industries due to the prevalence of antisemitism. In later years, while playing for several other pro baseball teams around the country, the slightly built Cooney was variously referred to as the “Little Yiddisher,” the “Yiddish Cowboy,” “Yiddish Mercury” and “Ikey Cohen-stein,” as Mike Cooney (no relation) wrote for SABR’s BioProject.

As Reese reached his 20s, the Nazis were rising to power in Germany, and at home, Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent was proclaiming the “International Jew” as “the world’s problem.” This was the world Reese, born in New York but raised in Los Angeles, was inhabiting as he served as a batboy for the Pacific Coast League’s Los Angeles Angels and later became a star infielder for the Oakland Oaks.

As one story goes, during an exhibition game involving celebrities, the songwriter Harry Ruby -- who had once aspired to be a pro baseball player -- relayed pitches to his Jewish catcher by speaking Yiddish instead of using signs. Reese played in that game, knew what was coming, and went 4-for-4.

Listed at 5-foot-11 and 165 pounds, Reese was by all accounts an excellent defensive second baseman, drawing the attention of Yankees scouts who routinely bird-dogged the PCL. By August 1927, Reese and shortstop Lyn Lary were purchased by the Yankees for $125,000, but Reese didn’t make it to Yankee Stadium until 1930.

As Marty Appel wrote in his 2012 Yankees tome, Pinstripe Empire, Reese’s arrival in the Bronx and his Jewishness were hardly noted, if at all.

That same year, 1930, a 19-year-old burgeoning slugger named Hank Greenberg made his big league debut with the Detroit Tigers. The right-handed-hitting first baseman grew up in the Bronx, a four-sport star at James Monroe High School who was plainly on the Bronx Bombers’ radar. That meant having the attention of Yankees scout Paul Krichell, who seven years earlier signed Lou Gehrig (among many other Yankees stars). According to Pinstripe Empire, Greenberg “saw his path blocked by Gehrig and turned down a Yankee offer for a faster path to the Majors” with Detroit.

While Greenberg rose to stardom wearing the Old English “D” on his cap, the Iron Horse maintained a tight grip on the Yankees’ first-base job -- and could count on Reese to be a good teammate at all times. As Reese told Scott Ostler of the Los Angeles Times in 1985, Gehrig “was in a slump once, which means he went 0-for-4,” and was insistent on correcting his swing. “So, we went to breakfast early, then to the ballpark. I pitched batting practice to him for about 10 minutes, and he said, ‘I think I’ve got it.’

“That day, he hit four line drives,” Reese told Ostler, adding that Gehrig’s idea of a big evening was to say, “‘Jimmie, let’s celebrate. Let’s have a beer with dinner.’”

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There was no vacancy at second base, either, for the 1930 Yankees, who had a future Hall of Famer there in Tony Lazzeri, another former PCLer by way of San Francisco. Yet, the lefty-hitting Reese managed to appear in 77 games (48 starts), batting .346 (65-for-188) on a Joe McCarthy-led team that finished third despite a lineup featuring Gehrig, Lazzeri, Bill Dickey, Earle Combs and the incomparable Ruth.

“He was the greatest to play the game,” Reese told Associated Press writer Jack Stevenson in 1974 of his legendary Spring Training roommate of 1930 and ’31. “And he was great with the kids, the fans and the young ballplayers. I remember waiting for him in his car outside Yankee Stadium for two hours while he signed autographs, sitting on the fender.”

Apparently, Mrs. Babe Ruth was fond of Reese and thought he’d be a good influence on the Babe.

Reese played 65 games for a 1931 Yankees team that finished second, played 90 games for the sixth-place St. Louis Cardinals in ’32, then spent the remainder of his playing days in the PCL. By the time Maddon arrived with the Angels organization in the mid-1970s, first as a Minor League catcher before becoming a big league coach, Reese was a fixture on the Angels’ staff.

“He hung out with the pitchers a lot,” says Maddon, remembering Reese peppering the likes of Mark Langston, Chuck Finley and Jim Abbott with grounder after grounder and making them run sprints.

“Not only was it a good workout, but it made you a much better fielder on the mound,” Abbott, who pitched for the Yankees in 1993 and ’94, told HalosHeaven.com in 2007. “But working with him was always fun.

“I remember the laughs more than the sweat.”

On a personal level, “He made me feel like a million bucks when I wasn’t worth anything,” says Maddon, who toiled for years as a scout, coach and manager in the Angels’ system. “Oftentimes, he’d put a hand on my shoulder, and he’d have tobacco juice dripping down the sides of his mouth, a couple-day beard growth, holding his fungo. He’d get real close with those steel blue eyes, and he’d tell me, ‘You’re the master. You’re going to be a big league manager someday.’”

Reese himself never wanted to be a manager. He liked being a coach, the liaison between the players and the skipper.

“He’d give you advice, and you’d walk away feeling great,” says Maddon. “We need more Jimmies in our lives.”

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Into his 80s, Reese was still a wizard with a fungo bat. He gave away a lot of personal items from his baseball lifetime, and he once gave one of those customized fungo bats to Maddon. But somewhere along the path to managing the Rays and Cubs before returning to the Big A, Maddon lost it.

“Of all the things I accumulated, that may be the one thing I wish I still had,” he says. Reese elevated fungo hitting to an art form, and “it is a lost art. Now, they’re using more machines to hit ground balls than they are a coach with a fungo.”

But even a baseball generation ago, “If you were known as being good with the fungo, you were invaluable,” Maddon says. “Certain infielders would only want you to hit them ground balls. Certain outfielders would only want you to hit them fly balls; certain pitchers would only want you to hit them PFP [pitchers’ fielding practice].”

In his later years, Reese was mostly relegated to infielders’ practice, but his accuracy never slipped. It was a show, watching him operate.

“He cut that fungo the way he did so that, as you threw the ball back to him, he’d flip it to the flat side,” recalls Maddon. “He could scoop it up in one motion and not have to bend down and pick up the ball.”

Back in the dugout, Reese would regularly gather an audience before games.

“You looked forward to seeing him; you wanted to talk to Jimmie,” Maddon says. “You wanted to be with him and hear what he was thinking.”

Along with sharing a wealth of baseball memories and his observations on the game, “He had such a contemporary sense of humor for being in his 80s, in a classic way,” says Maddon. “That’s what I loved about him. He remained contemporary.”

In all those conversations, Reese’s family background wasn’t a subject. It was only later that Maddon learned of Reese’s Jewish heritage. “I never discussed it with him. It was never a topic. The topic was primarily about the day and what was happening around the club.”

When he passed away in the summer of 1994, a month before an MLB work stoppage that would eventually cancel the season, “we all suffered it,” says Maddon. “He was the youngest 92-year-old I’d ever met.”

The Angels retired Reese’s No. 50, honoring his 77 years in baseball.

One of a kind, Jimmie Reese had another superpower -- the ability to avoid calamity.

Often and with concern, Maddon would watch Reese wade into the pregame three-ring circus of flying fungoes, batting practice hits and throws from every direction, always emerging without a scratch.

“Balls would be whistling by him, and he’d never get hit,” says Maddon. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s like he had a shield around him.”

Maddon has an autographed Arizona Republic article on Reese framed in his home office, along with a T-shirt the Angels’ staff made up featuring some of Reese’s sayings.

“It’s sad that the game doesn’t look for people like that anymore,” Maddon says of guys like Jimmie Reese, Don Zimmer and Preston Gomez. “They were responsible for passing the game along, and now there’s not enough of that.”

Pete Caldera is a contributing writer to Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the October 2024 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.