John C. Hoffman of The Sporting News went on to report that the John Sherman Lollar name spans several generations. I also sourced a PSA Bio and discovered that John Sherman Lollar Senior was an old semi-pro ballplayer who played catch with his son outside their family grocery store in Fayetteville, Arkansas, starting at the age of three. Senior died five years later in 1932. The great-grandfather fought for the North in the Civil War and started the name tradition in honor of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who passed it on to his son, came to be known as “Sherm.” The name connection is even more appropriate after he proved, as a Major League catcher, to be a dependable field general.
The death of Sherm’s father added additional responsibilities for the entire family. His mother, Ruby, who helped support the family as a librarian, sold the store, temporarily moved to Guin, Alabama, but returned to Fayetteville to work for the Veteran’s Administration. There were three younger siblings, Bonnie, Pat, and Jerry. Despite the disruption in his life, Lollar’s interest in baseball never waned. In 1936, shortly before he turned twelve, he became a batboy for the Fayetteville Bears in the Arkansas-Missouri League.
A 1957 Saturday Evening Post article added, “Sherman would warm up the pitchers between innings and do a good job. The crowds would get a big kick out of seeing this frail, skinny kid catch and throw to second base.”
Hoffman then went on to write: “After graduating from Fayetteville High School, a school that had no baseball team, so his sole sports option was to play basketball, the sixteen-year-old Lollar took a job with J.C. Penney in Pittsburg, Kansas. He played with a team affiliated with the Chamber of Commerce in the Ban Johnson League while also studying at Pittsburg State Teachers College (now Pittsburgh State University). Two years later, after the Ban Johnson League folded, Lollar both played for and managed the semipro Baxter Springs (Kansas) Miners, working as a brakeman in a local mine when he wasn’t playing baseball.”
As Hoffman further reported, “the mining team, managed by Barney Barnett, an old semi-pro player, and played three or four times a week. Lollar had been rejected by his draft board in World War II and one of his teammates was a pitcher named Stan West, who belonged to the Baltimore team of the International League. West was engaged in defense work, but he recommended Lollar to Tommy Thomas, former White Sox pitcher, who was then managing the Baltimore team.”
A cyst on his throat kept him from the service, so he was able to continue to play ball, unlike some of his contemporaries whose careers were interrupted by the war. He had to be thinking of his father, who died in the hospital from a carbuncle or cluster of boils caused by bacterial infection. Sherm’s cyst was not related but it was in a similar part of the body. It might have been related to his premature death at the age of 53 in 1977. Cancer was the cause, and I have medallion in my collection from the Sherm Lollar/Nellie Fox Cancer Foundation. Fox died two years earlier at only 48-years-of-age from skin cancer related to smokeless tobacco that always filled his cheek and became a trademark.
“Lollar joined the minor league Orioles in August, 1943 and caught 12 games before the conclusion of the season. The next season he became the regular catcher for the Orioles but batted only .250 in 126 games. However, he had 15 home runs and drove in 72 runs and was the team’s number one catcher again in 1945.”
Sherm was quoted as saying, “I don’t recall that I ever wanted to be anything else except a catcher. It seems like I was born with a catcher’s mitt on my hand. I can remember playing pepper and catching with my arm was still sore from vaccination. That must’ve been before I was six years old.”
“When the time came for me to join the Baltimore team in Buffalo, mother was pleased. She knew it would have been dad‘s wish that I should be a professional ball player and so she gave me her wholehearted support.”
He went on to say, “the Baltimore club sent me my transportation to Buffalo, but it never occurred to me that I should get any kind of a bonus for signing a contract. I was just glad to get the chance to play.”
“Lollar told, too, how he happened to break into the lineup and then became the regular catcher in 1944. Most of the boys had gone into the service, he said, and there wasn’t there weren’t too many players left. Then in 1944, the Cleveland club, which had a working agreement with Baltimore was supposed to send a couple of catchers to the Orioles, but they were late getting around to it. And by the time they got there, I had caught several games and was going pretty good, so Tommy Thomas just left me in the lineup.”
Sherm became the International League MVP in 1945 after a great season with a league-leading “.364 batting average, and 111 RBIs in 139-games. He also hit 34 homers, 27 doubles and four triples. Half a dozen big league teams, including the White Sox had tried to buy him. Chicago offered $50,000 for his contract but Cleveland had first choice. At spring training, he was one of a dozen catchers and one of them, just out of the service was Jim Hegan. Hegan won the job.”
Sherm Lollar made his Major League debut April 20, 1946, with the Indians, and caught 28-games as back-up to Frankie Hayes, who held a 312-game streak of consecutive games as well as Hegan, just another future catching legend, like his predecessor, somehow ignored by Cooperstown.
I was disturbed to find that although Lollar was born in Dunham, Arkansas and spent his younger years nearby Fayetteville, the Arkansas Department of Tourism website does not even recognize him as worthy of their list of “famous athletes.” This lack of disrespect extends to the Baseball Hall of Fame, where only a handful of catchers are enshrined, despite their key leadership role on their respective teams. At least, there’s a blurb about him in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Thankfully, The Sporting News has been generous on their reporting of his career.
On the next page of The Sporting News was a side-article written with the headline: Top Moment? Game in ‘53 when his bat beat the Yankees. According to the author Hoffman, “it is doubtful if anyone would have detected it, because Sherm Lollar, ace catcher of the Chicago White Sox staff, is never demonstrative, but he was a mighty pleased young man the evening of May 14, 1953. In fact, it was his biggest thrill of his baseball career. The White Sox were behind four to one in the seventh to the Yankees in a game in New York. Teammates, Tom Wright and Vern Stevens were on base when Lollar hit a homer in the left field stands to tie the game. The score was tied again 5-5 in the eighth and then in the ninth Lollar opened with a single but replaced by a pinch runner, Red Wilson, who scored the winning run.”
The box scores that day showed two singles, a home run, and a walk. Lollar also scored twice and drove in three. Perhaps he had a personal grudge to settle against the Bronx Bombers and Manager Bill Dickey, who first sent him to Newark, favoring left-handed Yogi Berra behind the plate. Lollar was then traded the following year after a wrist injury to the St. Louis Browns, despite a 3-4 performance including two doubles in the 1947 World Series. Yogi replaced him in the batting order in Game 3 and hit the very first pinch-hit homer in Series history.
Maybe the Championship ring that Lollar earned that year never fit him comfortably. “I thought I was in after that,” Lollar said, “but I sat on the bench practically all of the next season. I got into only 22 games, and I guess that kind of shook my confidence, but you just have to take the bad breaks with the good ones in this game.” With the move to the Browns in 1949, he earned his first of 7 career All-Star selections.
It wasn’t until he came to the White Sox for the 1952 season before he got a full-time catching job, after spending six of his eighteen years as a non-starter. I was only one-year old at the time, so it wasn’t until 7-years later that I became one of his biggest fans, during the course of the 1959 World Series.
To be continued…..
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