Suddenly A Star -- Dick Ellsworth, Chicago Cubs

During the 1960s, the editors of Sport magazine published an annual called Who's Best In Sports that featured prfiles with pictures of the nation's top professional athletes, from baseball, football, basketball, and hockey to boxing, swimming, ice skating, and track and field.

The 1964 edition had one athlete under letter E in the table of contents, that of Chicago Cubs lefthander Dick Ellsworth (p. 52). An 18-year-old green rookie wearing Cubbie blue in 1958, Ellsworth struggled to make his mark --until 1963 when he posted a 22-10 record and a 2.10 earned run average for the seventh-place (82-80) Cubs under head coach Bob Kennedy. The article "Suddenly A Star" recounted how pitching coach Fred Martin worked with Ellsworth on sliders, curves and control, helping him to reverse a 20-loss season in 1962. Ellsworth, like many pitchers in 1963, aqlso befitted from an expanded strike zone that boosted pitching stats and lowered batting averages and home run/RBI totals for a considerable number of big-league boppers.

The article came to mind this week because May 9 was the 48th anniversary of Ellsworth's 3-1 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates at Wrigley Field. In that game, Ellsworth induced 22 ground ball outs from the Bucs and first baseman Ernie "Mr. Cub" Banks set a record of 22 putouts in 23 chances (see Baseball Almanac online under National League chronology, 1963, Year by Year). The game epitomized the return of pitching dominance resulting from Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick's reaction to the slugfesting of 1961 and 1962, including Roger Maris's 61-home run season in '61 that broke the all-time single-seson mark held by Babe Ruth, a close friend of Frick's. The commissioner believed that home runs had come too easy and often so the low strike became an antidoteof which sinkerballer Ellsworth took full advantage.

Sadly, Ellsworth never again achieved that type of stardom again. The acclaim over his terrific season left as suddenly as it came, like a shooting star in the sky. The 23-year-old southpaw from Lusk, Wyoming had the misfortune of playing with a string of mediocre Cub teams and won just 14 games the next two years, dropping off to 8-22 in 1966 under new manager Leo Durocher as the Cubs lost 103 games. After one seaon in Philadelphia, Ellsworth won 16 games for the Boston Red Sox in 1968, then finished up with Cleveland and Milwaukee, posting an 0-1 record in 11 relief appearances for the Brewers in 1971.

Ellsworth's story is probably more common than we realize. Big-league stardom comes to a comparative few pitchers who are fortunate if they last as long as Ellsworth did. For one year, in 1963, Dick Ellsworth had his season in the Wrigley Field sun.