Happy Birthday, Phil!

Celebrating an Underrated Canadian Star

October 25, 2022

 

I am certainly well past the age of gushing about pro athletes. Darryl Sittler was my first man crush, Tim Raines the second. Beyond that, I’ve long since stopped worshipping professional athletes. They have preternatural athletic talents, but they’re human after all.

But there’s one ballplayer from before my time that I still look up to, if such a thing is possible.

Phillip Joseph Marchildon was born on this day in 1913, the fourth child of Oliver and Elizabeth, in Penetanguishene, a small town nestled amongst the tall pines along the sloping Georgian Bay shoreline.

As a young child, Phil was nicknamed Bé, or Babe in English. The moniker stuck with Phil throughout his life. He was an athletic prodigy, excelling in all sports - one of his proudest possessions was a cup he won for accumulating the most overall points at a track meet. It was a lean time in the Marchildon home, and Phil went to school that day without breakfast, and no lunch.

In the fall of 1934, Phil was offered a football scholarship to St Michael’s (a private Catholic high school in Toronto run by the Basilian fathers) the previous fall after his hometown Penetang High School football team defeated St Mikes on a snowy October day in the North Simcoe town. Marchildon, PHS’ star halfback and punter, took a direct snap late in the game with the score tied at 0, and tossed to a touchdown pass to a wide receiver who had pretended to go to the bench.

Phil was also the star pitcher for the Penetang Spencer Foundry Rangers, the local entry in the North Simcoe League. His experience at St Mike’s was somewhat limited by the fact that after winning the league title, the Rangers began play after Labour Day in the Ontario Baseball Amateur Association’s Intermediate B playdowns. Without Phil on the mound, the Rangers were just another amateur team, so the businessmen of the town pooled their funds to provide a car and gas money for a driver - usually Oliver - to drive to Toronto to pick Phil up and take him to wherever the team was playing. While trying to earn a spot on the St Mike’s team and keep up with his studies, Phil was ferried to Penetang, North Bay, and Meaford, before leading his club into battle with the Chatham Coloured All Stars, who broke the colour barrier in Ontario baseball that fall. Over the next ten weeks, Phil pitched in 10 pressure-packed, high-leverage games (in the five games his team won over that span, the margin of victory in every one of those contests was one run), before the Rangers succumbed to the All Stars in a controversial and tension-filled series for the OBAA title.

Phil’s hectic fall schedule meant that he spent a lot of time on St Mike’s bench, and as he told his biographer Brian Kendall, the regimen of practices and studying maybe was not for him:

Eventually, I became so bored that one two or three occasions, I climbed the school fence at night and escaped to a nearby tavern for beer, some place where they weren’t too fussy about checking for ID. I was joined on these outings by a novice priest who was beginning to question whether he really did have the calling.

Hoping for a shot at pro ball, Phil took two steps the following year in that direction. One was to move to the Sudbury, ON, area, where by day he worked in the nickel mines, and in the evenings pitched in the highly competitive Nickel Belt League. The other was to knock three years off of his age, knowing that scouts would be more impressed by a 20 year old blowing the ball past Nickel Belt sluggers. He laughingly called that his “baseball age” in later years.

When Dapper Dan Howley, who managed the International League’s Toronto Maple Leafs to two championships before embarking on a six year run managing big league also-rans, returned to the city to run the club’s front office in 1937, Phil saw his chance. Howley was an old fishing buddy of Jim Shaw, Phil’s manager with the Rangers; Howley had even come up to Penetang in the summer of 1934 to mentor Phil for a few weeks. Howley was determined to run the Leafs free of big league affiliation in his return, and with the help of veteran scout, manager, and former big leaguer Clyde Engle, ran tryout camps across Ontario to find the next diamond in the rough, the next arm behind the barn. Phil used his week of vacation time in the summer of 1938 to travel (borrowing a buddy’s car) from Sudbury to Barrie to attend one of those camps. After going through some drills, the players attending the tryout were arranged by Engle into two teams for a game. Phil struck out all six hitters he faced, but being a shy sort - as he readily admitted - he waited around after the game to see if Engle would talk to him. When that didn’t happen, Phil drove back to Penetang for the rest of his vacation. Word eventually reached Howley in Toronto of Phil’s exploits, and a few days after he returned to Sudbury, Howley showed up in town, contract offer in hand.

The following spring, Phil attended the Leafs training camp in Florida, and made the opening day roster. He struggled with the leap in competition, and was sent to Cornwall of the Can-Am League. Phil made the necessary adjustments to pro hitters, and won 10 games with Toronto the following season, earning a brief stint with the Philadelphia Athletics, who had purchased his contract. By 1941, Phil was a front of the rotation starter with the A’s, winning 27 games over the next two seasons before enlisting in the RCAF.

Phil served as a gunner on a Halifax bomber. By the late summer of 1944, he and his crew had completed 25 missions, and were only five away from being rotated home, when they were shot down in the North Sea near Denmark. Phil successfully parachuted into the water, where he met up with the plane’s navigator, a non-swimmer who was struggling despite wearing a life jacket. The pair floated for some time before being picked up by a Danish fishing boat. Phil thought they were home free, until they saw the German patrol boat waiting for them as the trawler pulled into port. Phil spent nine months as a German POW, and had to endure Hitler’s infamous Long March, a four-month trek in the middle of winter across Poland and Germany in harsh conditions. The experience left its mark on Phil, as it did all the 80 000 survivors from an initial group of over 250 000 POWs.

Phil and his fellow prisoners were liberated in May of 1945, but after returning home, he was in no shape - physically or mentally - to pitch. Nonetheless, A’s manager/owner Connie Mack pestered him to return to the mound, sensing a big gate in the offing. On August 17th - a year to the date he had been shot down - Phil pitched in relief in Cleveland. Twelve days later, he started against Washington back in Philadelphia. The A’s drew 19 000 fans, one of their largest crowds of the season. The penurious Mack even got off of his wallet to present Phil with a $1000 Victory Bond in a pre-game ceremony. For a moment, Phil was impressed with the old curmudgeon:

 At that moment I was ready to rethink my opinion of Mack as a tightwad and look upon him as the benevolent old gentleman the public thought him to be. But it wasn’t long before I reminded myself that Mack hadn’t thought to pay me a bonus for winning 17 games in 1942, and that now, with no concern for my physical condition, he was willing to use me as a gate attraction. How many extra thousand dollars was he pulling in that night? Mack owned me every penny of that $1000 and more.

Phil returned to form in 1946, and in 1947 won 19 games in a career year. The A’s finished fourth that season, the closest Phil ever got to the post-season. 1947, of course, was a milestone year in baseball - Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier with Brooklyn, and on July 5th, Cleveland owner Bill Veeck broke ranks with the other American League owners and signed Larry Doby. Phil didn’t understand the problem some players and the public had with the long overdue integration of the game:

 Having played in games against blacks as an amateur back home in Ontario, I had trouble understanding what all the fuss was about. Those players who objected to Robinson’s presence were mostly southerners who had grown up with segregation. I heard a couple of teammates say they wanted no part of playing with “n——-s.” But the majority of us felt everyone deserved a fair chance. Many players had just finished fighting in a war that was supposed to be about preserving democracy. Well, didn’t blacks…..deserve their rights too?

After the ‘47 season, the 34 (non-baseball age) year old Marchildon was on the downside of the career, retiring in 1950. He was, in my opinion - and there is a lot to unpack here - the first Canadian born-and-raised MLB star of the modern era. My connection to Phil is quite simple. While I never met the man, growing up in Midland, Penetang’s neighbour and historic rival, I played hockey many times in the Penetang Arena (a late 40s project Phil was involved in fundraising for). As a kid who played hockey for something to do between baseball seasons - not the other was around, as it was for most my age - I was always taken by the big black and white photo of an old ballplayer that graced the lobby of the arena. That player, of course was Phil.

Had he been born at a different time, and maybe signed with a different team, Phil’s career might have taken a greater trajectory. Just the same, despite growing up in a baseball backwater, not signing his first contract until 26, and missing almost three seasons due to World War II, Phil still managed to win 68 games for a second division team. He took his rightful place in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1983. Phil passed away in 1997. That a local guy pitched in the big leagues has never ceased to amaze me.

Happy Birthday, Phil!

If you would like to read more about Phil and that historic 1934 season, please check out my book on Amazon/Kindle, as well as most ebook platforms.