Frank Saucier had one hit in 14 at-bats in a brief Major League career, but it’s a plate appearance he didn’t get that ties him to one of the zanier moments in baseball history.
On Aug. 19, 1951, Saucier was listed as the right fielder and leadoff hitter in the St. Louis Browns’ lineup for Game 2 of a Sunday doubleheader against the Tigers at Sportsman’s Park. But he never made it to the plate. As he approached the on-deck circle, he stopped in his tracks.
“For the Browns,” the ballpark announcer said to the crowd, “Number one-eighth, Eddie Gaedel, batting for Saucier.”
With that, Saucier turned around and headed back to the dugout as his new 3-foot-7 teammate walked toward the plate clutching a toy bat.
“When the announcer called Eddie, I was thinking this is both the greatest act of show business I’ve ever seen, plus it’s the easiest money I’ve ever made,” Saucier told ESPN in 2001.
Saucier, one of three remaining St. Louis Browns, passed away on Monday at the age of 98, in Amarillo, Tex. Ed Mickelson, 98, and Billy Hunter, 96, are the last living Browns.
While it might seem like being the setup to a stunt would sour Saucier’s brief Major League experience, the start that afternoon was both rare and unexpected. In the 17 other games he played that season (encompassing his entire career), he started just two. A contract holdout delayed his signing until July, and as he tried to work his way into playing shape, a sore shoulder and blistered hands limited his availability to one start and eight pinch-hitting appearances before that Sunday doubleheader. He wasn’t expecting to play at all.
“I couldn’t swing a bat or throw a ball and here I was in right field. Bobby Young, the second baseman, said that if the ball was hit to me, he would run out and I should throw it underhand to him,” Saucier told ESPN in 2001, recalling the top of the first inning. Of course, as luck would have it, Detroit’s Vic Wertz lined a single to right field with a runner on first, requiring Saucier to make a throw to third. “That was the last throw I made until the following March.”
Francis Field Saucier (pronounced so-SHAY) was born on May 28, 1926, on a farm in Leslie, Mo., the youngest of six children. According to his obituary, the doctor asked for a rooster as payment. When Saucier was 5, the family moved to Washington, about 50 miles west of St. Louis. He played basketball in high school because there was no baseball team and upon graduating in 1943 earned a partial scholarship to Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. To help pay for school, Saucier enlisted in the Navy’s V-12 officer training program, according to his SABR bio. Yet he still managed to star on Westminster’s basketball and baseball teams, batting .519 in 1944.
Saucier finished his Naval training with four months at the University of Notre Dame, getting a waiver from his commanding officer to graduate with his class in March 1945 even though he was not yet 19, the required age to become a commissioned officer. He volunteered for an amphibious assault group that was the forerunner to the Navy Seals and spent a year at sea in the Philippines and Japan, where he was among the first to visit Hiroshima after it was leveled by an atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945. Saucier was released from active duty and returned to Westminster to complete his studies and play baseball.
After graduating with a degree in civil engineering in 1948, the left-handed-hitting catcher and outfielder signed with the Browns and appeared in 39 games with the Class D Belleville (Ill.) Stags of the Illinois State League. A broken thumb cut short a stellar season: a .357/.486/.536 line with nine doubles, two triples, four home runs and 31 RBIs. Saucier spent most of 1949 at Class B Wichita Falls, where his. 446 batting average – along with a .507 on-base percentage and .652 slugging percentage for a 1.159 OPS – was tops in professional baseball and earned him Hillerich & Bradsby’s Silver Slugger Award. In 1950, he led the Texas League with a .343 average at Double-A San Antonio. The Sporting News named him Minor League Player of the Year.
The San Antonio Missions won the Texas League, earning a berth in the Dixie Series against Nashville, but there was one problem: Saucier’s wedding was scheduled for Sept. 30, in between the third and fourth game of the series. He had met Virginia Pullen the year before while playing in her hometown of Wichita Falls, northwest of Dallas. She gave Saucier the OK to miss their rehearsal dinner on Friday night so he could play in Game 3 down in San Antonio. He went 3-for-4 with a double, a run and an RBI in a 4-2 loss, then made his way to Wichita Falls – in a plane rented by the Missions. San Antonio lost Game 4 as well to fall behind in the series, three games to one, before winning the final three to take the title. Saucier played in all seven games, batting .375 with four doubles and three RBIs to earn MVP honors.
But the true MVP might’ve been his new wife. Asked by his SABR biographer for his greatest thrill in baseball, Saucier was quick with a reply: “Meeting Virginia Pullen in 1949 in Wichita Falls. The night she said ‘yes’ was the biggest thrill of my life.”
In between the 1949 and ’50 seasons, Saucier had taken a job with an oil company in Oklahoma City and soon purchased an interest in a well, according to a blog post by his great-nephew. This business led the couple to settle in Oklahoma, and the oil interests provided a good living – more money, in fact, than the contract he was offered by the Browns early in 1951. “It wouldn’t take much more money than they have offered to get me in line,” Saucier said, according to his great-nephew. “I realize that a rookie coming up to the Major Leagues is generally expected to accept $5,000 minimum salary. But frankly, I’m earning more than that right here in the oil fields.”
When he didn’t sign his contract, the Browns suspended him and placed him on the ineligible list in April 1951.
Three months later, Bill Veeck bought the team and made signing Saucier one of his top priorities. Hours after the team lost an Independence Day doubleheader to the Yankees, Veeck tracked down Saucier at his parents’ house in Missouri. Unable to convince the 25-year-old phenom to sign over the phone, Veeck got in a car just after midnight and drove from St. Louis to the Saucier home in Washington. They hashed out the details in the wee hours of the morning.
“We drank coffee from about 1 in the morning until about daylight in the kitchen …” Saucier said in a 2015 interview on the Passed Ball Show podcast. “He said, ‘Well, I want to talk you into returning to baseball.’ And I said, ‘Bill, you could talk the rest of your life and you couldn’t talk me into it.’ I said, ‘You could pay me to come back …’”
Veeck made Saucier the fourth-highest-paid Brown with a $10,000 salary, behind pitcher Ned Garver, outfielder Roy Sievers and legend Satchel Paige.
“Well, I’m happy that’s over with,” Saucier told the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “All I want to do now, is make good.”
Having not played since the end of the previous season, Saucier had some catching up to do. “Timing is the toughest thing to get back after laying off baseball entirely for nine months,” he said.
Over the course of two weeks, Saucier worked out daily at Sportsman’s Park, the repeated swings leaving his hands cut and blistered. He made his Major League debut in St. Louis on July 21, 1951, grounding out as a pinch-hitter in the ninth against the Yankees. The next day, he got his first start, going 0-for-3 with a walk and a strikeout – and committing two errors in left field. He also developed bursitis in his right shoulder, leaving him unable to throw without pain and limiting him to pinch-hitting and -running.
A little over two weeks later, on Aug. 7, Saucier recorded his first – and only – big league hit. Pinch-hitting for pitcher Jim McDonald in the ninth inning at Cleveland, he doubled off right-hander Mike García in a 5-1 loss.
Eleven days later, back in St. Louis, Saucier drew a bases-loaded walk pinch-hitting in the seventh inning against the Tigers for the only RBI of his career. Two more walks and a single later, Saucier scored his first run. The Browns scored 11 times that inning on their way to a 20-9 victory.
The next day, he saw his name at the top of the lineup with the unfamiliar position of right field listed next to it.
“It was a little unusual since I couldn’t hit or throw,” he told his great-nephew. “I also thought it was strange because I only played left field.”
Willing to do anything to draw fans to the ballpark, Veeck had let only a select few people in on his plans to send Gaedel to the plate. Between games of the doubleheader – which drew a season-high 18,369 fans – Veeck staged a celebration for the American League’s 50th anniversary. Out of a giant cake wheeled onto the field emerged Gaedel, in a Browns uniform.
“After Eddie Gaedel popped out of the cake, he sat between [manager] Zack [Taylor] and me,” Saucier told ESPN. “He was pretty edgy and never said what he was going to do. So there’s Gaedel, in between both of us, and Taylor’s tying his shoes. I knew something was going to happen, but I wasn’t quite sure what.”
He didn’t find out until he was about to walk to the plate, bat in hand. After Gaedel’s four-pitch walk, he took his time getting to first base, stopping twice to doff his cap and bow to the crowd. Once he reached the bag, he was replaced by pinch-runner Jim Delsing.
“When he sat down between Zack and me, I said, ‘Eddie, you really hammed it up out there,’” Saucier said. “And he said, ‘Man, I felt like Babe Ruth.’”
Saucier got his third – and last – start in the first game of a twin bill on Aug. 26, going 0-for-4 with two strikeouts, a HBP and a run scored. He pinch-hit for the last time in the second game that day, then appeared six times as a pinch-runner as the Browns played out the string in September.
In January 1952, Saucier signed his contract and reported to Spring Training in California only to leave the team in March when he was recalled to active duty by the Navy. He served as a battalion commander in Pensacola, Fla., and played in a six-team Naval league – batting .542, according to his great-nephew.
After two years, Saucier was released from active duty. A new father about to turn 28 years old, he retired as a ballplayer. In a post-playing career that lasted until his retirement at 85, Saucier worked in oil and banking in the Texas towns of Tyler, Pampa and Amarillo. In 1980, Westminster College named its baseball field after him. He and Virginia, who died in 2009, had a daughter, Sara, and son, John. Both children survive him, along with two granddaughters and their spouses and four great-grandchildren.