The Futility Infielder

The Strange Tale of Buzz Arlett

A few days ago, in a solid effort to avoid getting any real work done, I came across the statistics of a player I'd never heard of, one whose name seemed ripped from the pages of some long-lost Ring Lardner novel: Buzz Arlett. What caught my eye about him was his sole line in the annals of major league baseball (stats from baseball-reference.com):

Year Ag Tm  Lg  G   AB    R    H   2B 3B  HR  RBI  SB  BB  SO    BA   OBP   SLG  

1931 32 PHI NL 121  418   65  131  26  7  18   72   3  45  39  .313  .387  .538

That's all she wrote--it's Arlett's only season in the bigs. Clearly the guy could HIT, but it took him forever to reach the majors, and after tearing the cover off the ball for one lousy (66-88) ballclub he was gone just as quickly. So that line of stats just hangs there in space, desperate for some company or an explanation. What is this, The Natural?

Scrolling down Arlett's baseball-reference page (see Sliced Bread, Greatest Invention Since), we find a clue to his mysteriously short big-league career: fielding. Arlett made 10 errors in 94 games as a rightfielder (though he did have 14 assists) and three more in 13 games at first base. Combined with his below-average range, it appears what we have here is a born DH who's come unstuck in time.

With that plausible theory in hand, I decided to do a bit of resarch on Arlett. Judging from what I found, I'm clearly not the first person whose curiosity about ol' Buzz was piqued. It turns out the man was a minor-league legend, a sort of Babe Ruth of the Pacific Coast League. In 1984, he was voted the most outstanding player in minor-league history by the Society for American Baseball Research.

His story certainly reads like a legend. The 19-year old Arlett started as a spitballing pitcher (righty) with the Oakland Oaks of the PCL in 1918. He won 99 games for them over 5 years (a high of 29) before arm trouble set in. By then his bat had proven too valuable to keep out of the lineup and he became a full-time, switch-hitting outfielder and a hell of a slugger. During his 13 years in the PCL, he set league records with 251 HRs and 1135 RBIs. In his best season, 1929, he hit .374 with 39 homers and 189 RBI, and he averaged .360/30/140 during his hitting years in Oakland.

The Pacific Coast League, in those days, was the predominant baseball league in the western U.S. Between World War II and the Dodgers and Giants arrival in 1958 (which expanded the majors geographically well beyond their furthest western outpost, St. Louis), the PCL even made a bid for major-league status. The league was full of high-quality talent that was just a step below major league level; big league teams often looked to the PCL for seasoned replacements when injuries arose, and players often preferred to play in PCL cities because of their cooler climates. It wasn't a bad gig, all things considered.

Arlett had drawn the attention of major league scouts during his time in Oakland, but not all of it was favorable. "Good hit, no field" was the tag a Cardinals scout stuck on him early in his career, and it dogged him. During his sole big-league season, a pitcher on Arlett's team suggested Buzz take a rocking chair to rightfield since it wouldn't affect the amount of ground he covered and he might as well be comfortable. He became something of an archetype; the representative of one big-league team, in scouting Ted Williams, dismissed the young Splinter as merely "another Buzz Arlett"--"[A] standard of comparison," wrote the great sportswriter Red Smith, "that still causes strong men to turn pale."

But Arlett also had his share of bad timing. In 1930, the Brooklyn Dodgers (or the Robins, as they were known during manager Wilbert Robinson's tenure) were looking for an extra outfielder. They sent a scout to the West Coast to look at two of the PCL's best hitters, Arlett and Ike Boone of the San Francisco Missions. Boone was hitting .448 at the time, and the previous season had not only hit .407 with 55 HRs but also set the all-time total-base record for organized baseball with 553 (of course, it helped that the PCL season was 200 games long). The day the Robins scout was in the stands, the 6'4", 235 lb Arlett got in a heated argument with the home plate umpire, who hit him in the face with his mask, injuring Arlett's eye and ending the Robins' pursuit of him; they signed Boone instead.

Arlett finally got his shot in the bigs the next season and fared well from a hitting standpoint; he was 4th in the NL in homers (teammate Chuck Klein led with 31), fifth in slugging, and seventh in OPS. Philly's Baker Bowl was a hitter's park and it was a high-offense era, though levels were somewhat down from the record-setting explosion of 1930 (4.48 runs per game in the 1931 NL, down from 5.68 in 1930). The Phils were then mired in a nearly 30-year tenancy down in the NL's second division, and they apparently decided they were just as well off without Arlett.

He caught on with the Baltimore Orioles of the International League, leading the circuit with 54 homers and 144 RBI, and hitting four home runs in a game twice in a five-week span. He led the league again the next year with 39 homers before moving onto the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association. Again, Arlett put up more monster seasons: .319/41/132 in 1934, .360/25/101 in 1935.

Arlett stopped playing after 1937, finishing his minor-leauge career with a .341 average, 432 homers (2nd all-time), 1786 RBI (2nd again), and .604 slugging percentage, as well as a 108-93 record with a 3.42 ERA as a pitcher. Like several other colorfully named PCL stars of the day (Jigger Statz, Smead Jolley, Lefty O'Doul), he put up decent numbers in the bigs when given a shot and probably should have done more (the ability to play some defense would have helped). Instead, his story is one of what might have been, one minor league sluggers from Ken Phelps to Erubiel Durazo could certainly identify with. Still, he's got a pretty interesting story, one I found fascinating. You learn something new every day...