Baseball Way Back: A conversation with Roe Skidmore, the Cubs one-hit wonder

Part 1 of 2

In my early days of watching baseball, I nurtured a passion for baseball statistics. Other than the multiplication table, it was the only area of math where I could claim a modicum of proficiency.

My dad would bring home a newspaper that wasn't the Tribune - a World War II vet, he was still angry about Col. Robert R. McCormick's political views. As soon as it was my turn to read the paper, I would quickly turn to the sports section and immediately jump to the page with the Cubs and Sox statistics.

At one point during the waning days of the 1970 season, something repeatedly caught my attention. Glancing at the Cubs batting statistics, I kept noticing that one man consistently led the team in batting with a 1.000 average.

Roe Skidmore's batting average remains perfect to this day. His career consisted of one at-bat, and he made the most of it.

The date was Sept. 17, 1970, two days before my 10th birthday. The 24-year-old Skidmore came up as a pinch hitter against the Cardinals and hit a single off Jerry Reuss. Reuss would go on to play another 20 years - a timespan that began when I attended elementary school and ended when I was in graduate school. It would last 20 years longer than Skidmore's one-game career.

Through the years, I would occasionally think about Skidmore and his perfect batting average, wondering whatever happened to him and why didn't he get more major league at-bats.

Thanks to the miracle of Facebook, I recently connected with Skidmore, who still lives in Decatur, the town where he was born and raised and where he played baseball at Millikin University and for the Decatur Commodores in the Giants minor league system.

Although I watched a lot of Cubs and Sox games in 1970, I did not see Skidmore's game, which the Cardinals won 9-2, dropping the Cubs to third place, so I was eager to hear his firsthand account.

"I've been asked that before," he said. "My comment is always when you only do it once, you can pretty much remember every detail of the at-bat."

And so, with self-effacing humor, he once again dug up the memory of that gloomy, rainy September afternoon, when the Cubs played their final game of the year at Wrigley Field.

In the bottom of the seventh, with the Cubs trailing 8-1, Ernie Banks led off with a fly out to center. Randy Hundley then grounded to short. Pitcher Joe Decker was scheduled to bat, when Cubs manager Leo Durocher summoned Skidmore.

"I was asked to remove myself from my place at the end of the bench, behind the pole, hiding from Leo," he said.

He remembered his knees knocking as he headed toward the bat rack.

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't really nervous," he said.

Skidmore had just been called up from the Cubs' AAA club in Tacoma.

"I didn't have a whole supply of bats. I brought, I think, three bats with me on the plane. I went to the bat rack, and I'll be danged if I could find one of my bats. And I know I had a couple of them out there, because I had taken batting practice and so forth. And I was trying to hurry and act like I knew what I was doing."

Finally, he emerged from the dugout and walked to the on deck circle wielding J.C. Martin's weapon.

One advantage Skidmore had was that he had faced Reuss in the minor leagues, when Skidmore was at Tacoma and Reuss was at Tulsa, as well as when Skidmore was toiling for Decatur and Reuss was at Cedar Rapids.

"I knew he had this big overhand curveball, and I'm thinking my motor skills aren't functioning all that well right now. I'm going to pray he throws me that big slow overhand curveball, so I can at least get the bat around.

"Well, the first pitch he throws me is a fastball right down the middle, and I swung about an hour late and hit it down the right field line into the seats."

Finally, "He threw me the big overhand curveball, and I was kind of looking for it, and I hit a line drive to left field and it went over Joe Torre's head. I can still see Joe Torre playing third base for the Cardinals. He jumped, and it cleared his glove. And then Lou Brock was playing left field, and he came in and fielded the ball and threw it to the infield to Dal Maxville. So my recollection is not my getting the hit, but it's the guys that the ball went past and went to that were the big names I had baseball cards of."

Skidmore's remaining time on the diamond was brief - he was forced at second on a Don Kessinger grounder.

"Of course, it was wonderful. I got the hit, and they threw the ball out. And I thought, man, this is easy. This is the big leagues, and I can get hits here. And little did I know that that was going to be the beginning of the end instead of the beginning of the beginning."

Coming in Part 2: The rest of the story