Who Was Bashful Stanley?

Unknown pitcher was the surprise star of South Bend's 1922 Industrial Baseball Season

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED SEPTEMBER 22, 2024

The 1922 World Series was a legendary tilt between a pair of New York Teams - Babe Ruth's Yankees versus John McGraw's Giants. It was a matchup that featured ten future Hall of Famers (11 if you count umpire Bill Klem). The 1922 campaign had been a fiasco from the beginning. The season started with Babe Ruth serving a 30-game suspension for a prohibited barnstorming tour and ended with a controversial tie in Game 3 of that same World Series.

But in South Bend, the New York World Series was only a secondary story in the local baseball world. Before Babe Ruth and Casey Stengel could take up hostilities against each other in the Polo Grounds, there was the matter of the local industrial league championship to solve. And like all of the games played at hometown parks, this one was a big deal.

The tales of South Bend's industrial leagues are legendary. Every factory had a team, many of them had their own fields, and the matchups between its marquee teams drew crowds into the thousands. These same teams would play scrimmages against Notre Dame's baseball team, travel across the Midwest to settle regional rivalries, and hold their own when barnstorming tours - like the one Babe Ruth got suspended for - came to town.

The league was known on a national scale and was watched closely by Major League scouts all summer long. Plenty of teams had a staff person assigned to South Bend, watching over high school ball, collegiate play at Notre Dame, and most of all, the industrial teams.

The juggernauts of the Industrial League are teams you would probably expect. Studebaker trotted out a pair of squads. The South Bend Lathe Works had a team and so did Mishawaka's Dodge Manufacturing Company. But the team that ran away with the 1922 title came from a place you might not know.

The George Cutter Company was a maker of electric lights and lightposts. They made their money supplying cities with traffic lights, lampposts, and indoor lighting for factories. They were in business from 1905 - 1929. In 1922, they also had the best damn baseball team in the city.

The newspapers tipped the Cutters to win the league even before the season started, lauding a handful of significant additions to the previous year's squad. Cutter had hired on Hector Garvey, a star offensive lineman at Notre Dame the year prior who was rumored to have lived in a cave and to have survived on a diet composed exclusively of beef carcasses. In 1922, Garvey would bat cleanup for the Cutters. He hit a home run in his first at-bat.

The team also added Matt Butch, the top baseball player from South Bend High School. Butch would play second base, and after missing the first two games because he was still in high school, he starred for the Cutters, serving as its number two pitcher and slashing .454/.482/.564 during the campaign.

The Cutters would prove to be the juggernaut the papers thought they might be, but the season wasn't without a few hiccups. After rattling off a pair of wins during the first month of play, the Cutters dropped an 8-2 tilt against the Studebaker Number Ones on June 3. The papers noted the Cutters had come into the game a little over-confident and blamed their loose play on the team's collective ego. If there was any truth to that, maybe the defeat was exactly what they needed.

The Cutters wouldn't lose to anyone else the rest of the season.

Bouyed by Butch and Garvey, and a largely unknown centerfielder called Brady, the Cutters put runs up in flurries, trouncing Dodge 15-6, routing Studebaker Number Two 13-7, and trampling South Bend Lathe 15-1. But most of all, they were lifted by a young pitcher who the papers called “Bashful Stanley.”

At the beginning of the season, Stanley had been a member of a three-man rotation, but by August he'd clearly ascended into a role as the team's ace. He struck out 10 lathe workers in a June contest and 15 of them during an August rematch.

The Cutters might have seemed invincible, but it would appear they had a kryptonite in the form of the Studebaker Number Ones. After splitting a July doubleheader with the automakers and dropping another tilt to the Studebaker squad down the stretch, the Cutters went into the final week of the season with a 12-3 record. It was the same record the Studebaker Number Ones had.

It would all come down to the final game.

The Cutters were 1-3 against the Number Ones on the season, but none of that would matter once the umpire - none other than Knute Rockne - called for the teams to 'Play Ball!' The winner of today's game would become the champions.

Max Butch did his part, going 2-for-4 and scoring a pair of runs. But the real star was Bashful Stanley, allowing just four hits over nine innings and striking out 7. The Cutters won 4-2.

The Cutters were the champions of the league, but the season wasn't quite over yet. They'd make a trip to Mansfield, Ohio to challenge the champions of that industrial league, taking a convincing 10-1 victory back to South Bend along with interstate bragging rights. They closed the slate with a 14-1 drubbing of South Bend's Standard Oil, champions of the B League.

Pro scouts were on hand for that contest. They watched Max Butch go 4-5 with two doubles and they saw Bashful Stanley strike out 14 oilmen. Whatever happened in the aftermath of that contest is anyone's guess, but Butch was back with the Cutters the next season. Stanley was never heard from again, and after several hours of research, I still don't actually know who he was.

Do you have any idea who “Bashful” Stanley, star pitcher for the 1922 George Cutter baseball team, was? Reach out, and let's solve a mystery together.