Chase Riddle is a real baseball
man in every sense of the term. He signed his first pro contract
at 17 and has been involved in baseball in one capacity for almost
60 years. Riddle is an inductee in the Alabama Sports Hall of
Fame and he had tremendous success as coach of Troy State University’s
baseball team. He played ball in towns from Winnipeg to Panama
City. He spent most of his career in the St. Louis Cardinals organization,
first as a minor league manager and then as director of scouting
in the southeastern U.S. and the Caribbean. His greatest scouting
success was the signing of Hall of Famer Steve Carlton to the
Cardinals.Chase Riddle was one of the true stars of the AFL. He
managed and played for 4 seasons, compiling an AFL lifetime batting
average of .361. In 1953 Riddle batted .411 and drove in
125 runs for Panama City. He caught, pitched, played third and
the outfield. He was an excellent base stealer, totalling 135
swipes in the four seasons he played. I talked to Chase at the
2000 league reunion.
SP:
I hope you don’t mind talking about the incident which brought
about the umpire strike in 1951.
(see
the strike story here)
CR: Right,
well I don’t mind. I was at fault, strickly at fault. You just
don’t do that (strike an umpire) and I knew better than that.
He was a rookie, just a guy that they had put in (to the league)
and he really wasn’t an umpire, and there had been a lot of problems
in the league. A guy had been killed with a pitched ball….
SP: Otis
Johnson.
CR: That’s
right. He was a friend of mine. A lot of things were happening
that had a lot of people disturbed, but I was definitely wrong.
I didn’t exactly hit him, I think, but somebody said I did.
SP: What
lead up to the problem.
CR: It was
an arguement over a call. Bill Farrar, who’s here today, was playing
left field for us. We were playing at Headland. The ball was hit
to the outfield and Bill went after it, then he just put on the
brakes and stopped. There was a little embankment in the outfield
there and the ball landed there. There were two men on base and
the umpire starts doing this (circling motion with finger indicating
a home run). I said to him, « The ball didn’t go out of the
ballpark, it’s out there on the bank ». I was protesting to
the umpire and I said, « Get some help. See if the infield
ump can help you ». Anyway, to make a long story short, I
told Bill Farrar to pick up the ball out there. Bill walked over
and picked up the ball and held it up. The ump said, « I don’t
care where you got that ball, when I saw the ball, it went out
of the park and it’s a home run. So that’s when I lost my cool
and that lead to that (the suspension) and that was a mistake.
I had been playing long enough to know better than that.
SP: And you
were suspended for the rest of the season.
CR: Yeah,
the rest of the season! I was lucky I didn’t get suspended forever.
He was a new umpire and there were a lot of problems in the league…
SP: The league
almost folded a couple times……
CR: They
almost folded, the managers and owners were pickin’ at each other
a little bit, and there was just no harmony in the league what
so ever.
SP: You knew
Otis Johnson well?
CR: Yes, I went
to school at Troy State with him and he was a good friend of mine.
He was a power hitter and it was known around the league that
he had a little trouble getting out of the way of a pitched ball
and whatever, but he was hit in the head, then they brought Clifton
(Jack Clifton, the Headland pitcher who beaned Johnson) back and
pitched him against Dothan again (Johnson’s team). Dothan prefered
that Clifton play the outfield for the rest of the season instead
of pitching some more, but he did pitch some more (that season).
SP: You obviously
hit against Jack Clifton yourself. He was a dominant pitcher that
season.
CR: He was. He knew how to
pitch and he did have a tendency to pitch inside to you on occasion.
A lot of pitchers still do that. It was just unfortunate that
he (Johnson) got hit in the head. The turmoil that went on after
that certainly caused problems and the Dothan and the Headland
clubs were having problems over the Clifton incident. The league
just had no stability at the time.
SP: After
all this you ended up back at Troy State.
CR: Well, that year (1951)
was my first year as a player manager. After that, I came back
the next season to Ozark where we won the pennant. Then I went
to Panama City and we won the pennant there too. From there I
went to Galveston, Texas. We had a working agreement there with
the Dallas ballclub. I went do there and about June I was doing
some good hitting so they brought me up to Dallas. I finished
the season out at Dallas and after that, I didn’t want to do a
lot of travelling, so I came back to the Dothan Cardinals. That
was 1955, and I stayed with the Cardinals for 23 years in some
capacity. I was a player/manager for about 9 years, and I spent
the rest of those 23 years as scouting supervisor for the southeast
and the Caribbean. Then I had wanted to retire and get off the
road and an opportunity opened up to coach Troy State University,
my alma mater. That was my home. I had been living in Troy for
all those years.
SP: It was called Troy State
Teachers College back then, wasn’t it?
CR: That’s right. I went to
school there in ’46 after I got out of the service, then played
baseball and scouted, then ended up right back there and coached.
SP: Troy’s diamond, Pace-Riddle
Field, is named after you. Who was Pace?
CR: Pace was president of the
university at one time.
SP: That’s an honor to have
the field named after you.
CR: Yes it is. Those were some
of the happiest years of my life. I was from Georgia originally,
then I came down to Troy because my brother was in school there
and I just made my home in Troy and never did leave. When I was
travelling around with the Cardinals, I always did come back to
Troy.
SP: Do you mind if I see your
(World Series) ring?
CR: That’s a World Series ring
with the St. Louis Cardinals. I was very fortunate, I got 3 of
these rings with the Cardinals and I have 2 NCAA championship
rings from Troy State.
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