Juan Marichal, Matty Alou, and a Minor League Stop in Michigan City

Before he was a homebuilder in LaPorte, Al Shinn was a manager to legends

BY KEN BRADFORD // POSTED SEPTEMBER 14, 2024

There's a story about baseball Hall-of-Famer Juan Marichal that leads to a LaPorte County home builder named Al Shinn.

For those of us who lived during the 1960s, Marichal's name is magic. He was a 10-time all-star pitcher for the San Francisco Giants from 1960 through 1973. During his heyday, he had six 20-win seasons and ranked near the top of the National League's best, along with Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson.

For fans of that era, Marichal was more than just numbers. He is remembered especially for his distinctive throwing motion. He kicked his left leg high - think about it as 11:30 on the clock dial - and created a vicious forward/downward thrust, as if he were scraping his cleats across the batter's forehead. Many a schoolboy experimented with that kick. Few, if any, could lift that far without falling backwards.

What most of us didn't know was that Marichal started his professional career in nearby Michigan City.

He was 20 years old, a fresh signee from the Dominican Republic, when the Giants sent him to their Class D affiliate, the Michigan City White Caps for the 1958 season. He wasted little time proving his worth. He won 21 of his 24 starts, striking out 246 batters in 245 innings and recording an earned run average of 1.87.

His success in Michigan City catapulted Marichal up three notches to Class A Springfield for the 1959 season. He spent another half-year at AAA Tacoma before his debut in San Francisco in 1960.

On that first night, he mastered a one-hit, 12-strikeout shutout of Philadelphia on July 19, 1960. He carried a no-hitter into that game until a two-out single in the eighth by Clay Dalrymple.

Michigan City is a nice place, but it's inconceivable nowadays that it would have its own minor league team. But minor leagues 70 years ago were more widespread and ballplayers often found their careers dying at small dots on the map.

Professional baseball is lean now, with the 30 major league teams having just 206 affiliates spread among the Class AAA, AA, A and Rookie League levels. In the 1950s, there were just 16 major league teams, but they had players stashed at teams at three additional levels - Classes B, C and D.

Those lower-level franchises opened and closed sporadically, but the number of minor league teams generally was between 400 and 450. If you're curious about where those teams were, your go-to place is baseball-reference.com for that. It's an amazing treasure chest of arcane data.

For example, it lists dozens of teams based in 34 Indiana cities, including the Elkhart Blue Sox in 1888, the Michigan City White Caps from 1956 to 1959, and 10 squads representing South Bend for 63 seasons under 11 different franchise names.

We can go to another online resource - newspapers.com - to tell the Michigan City story.

The place to start is a Missouri paper, the Farmington News. In the July 16, 1954, edition, sports editor H.L. Denman tells of the torrid hitting of local hero Allan Shinn, who had a .432 batting average - 100 hits and 90 walks in his first 233 official at-bats for Union City in the Kitty League.

A later story reports that the right fielder, who just turned 19, had played for five minor-league teams that season - Oshkosh, Big Stone Gap, Union City, Pauls Valley and Hannibal, Mo. Union City club officials told Denman that Shinn was one of the two best prospects to play in the Kitty League in decades.

Eight months later, Shinn was reporting to spring training in Mobile, Alabama, and that's where this newspaper trail ends. The final mention of Shinn in the Farmington News seems to be of a baby being born to him and his wife on February 19, 1956.

The rest of his story comes from a variety of web sources. During a train trip with his Hannibal team, Shinn met a Chicago woman named Georgiana Lewis. They married in January 1955, and she wanted to raise their family closer to her home. Shinn had been the player-manager in Hannibal, where the club was losing money, so he and new brother-in-law Bob Hood decided to bring the franchise to Michigan City. Bob Webster of the Society for American Baseball Research informs us that Shinn, at age 21, became a part-owner and manager of a brand-new team in Michigan City.

Games were played at Ames Field. General admission tickets were 75 cents and the White Caps drew an average of 768 fans per night that first season in 1956. It was a ragtag team - most of the players receiving $175 a month were going nowhere in their careers - and manager Shinn managed to eke out a 55-71 record.

It was the end of his playing career as well. He put himself in the lineup for just 33 games, mostly at first base, and had 18 hits in 54 at-bats. He was out of organized baseball the following season, having sold his interest in the White Caps to the owners of the B&K Root Beer chain.

 

 

For the 1957 season, the Giants brought in an older, more experienced manager named Richard Klaus. They also sent the White Caps more of its player resources, including future major leaguers Matty Alou, Bobby Bolin, Manny Mota and John Orsino.

Juan Marichal and Jose Tartabull arrived in 1958. Two more prospects headed to the major leagues - Rick Joseph and Wayne Schurr - arrived in 1959. But the White Caps were weak on the field and even weaker at the turnstiles (about 400 fans per game), and the Giants yanked their affiliation, planting it in Quincy, Illinois.

To me, this is a reminder to me of how amazing but cruel professional baseball could be.

Al Shinn was born in 1934, the same year as Hall of Fame right-fielders Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente and Al Kaline, among others. His baseball skills busted him free of Farmington, in the Lead Belt region of Missouri. At 17, he was signing a pro contract. At 19, he was a top prospect. At 20, he was a player-manager. At 21, he was a team owner.

Then, at 22, he was pouring concrete and stacking bricks.

Shinn had left baseball and turned his attention to the construction industry. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. He had a long, happy marriage and raised a daughter and four sons, and he became well known in LaPorte County for nurturing baseball players at all levels.

As late as 1984, he was still playing baseball with the Michigan City Stars in the Michiana Amateur Baseball League, and his family continued to be active in LaPorte County baseball for decades.

Shinn died in June of 2016. If this writing project had begun earlier, imagine the conversations about those days 70 years ago, about farm boys becoming baseball heroes, about watching youngsters like Juan Marichal get their first big breaks.

Imagine the questions or regrets: Did his meteoric rise stop with a sore arm or a twisted knee? Did he get tired of playing in tiny towns in front of small crowds? Was it the bad pay, the prospect of feeding a family on $175 a month?

But imagine, too, a bygone time when a 21-year-old kid could saunter into town and start a minor league team without the help of millionaire bankers and lawyers.

Al Shinn was the guy who did it.

Ken Bradford was a writer and editor for the South Bend Tribune for 31 years before his retirement in 2010. He began his newspaper career with an article about a banana leaf for LaSalle High School's school newspaper, The Explorer, in 1971.