Garland Buckeye and the off-season of our discontent

As the old adage goes, when Jerry Dipoto gives you no moves, make weird content with what you have

This off-season stinks.

I hate hypotheticals and am a generally impatient person, so I tend to think most off-seasons stink overall. But this one has been particularly, egregiously smelly. The Mariners, of course, did us no favors, cratering into the off-season by missing out on the playoffs by just one game. Again. The beats reported the front office had about $15 million to work with, they jettisoned Jorge Polanco and Josh Rojas, creating fun new holes on top of existing ones, and the man who rightfully earned the nickname Trader Jerry has been nowhere to be seen.

So, with an absence of new toys to play with, or good vibes to reflect on, or any real rumors to sink our teeth into, what is a wee blog - at the mercy of the hungry masses and churning content machine - to do?

Write about Drew Pomeranz’s* great grandfather, of course.

Like many big leaguers, baseball was a family affair for the Pomeranzes (Pomeranzs? Pomeranzi?). His father played college ball at Ole Miss, and his older brother, Stu**, played in the majors too. But the most illustrious baseballer in the Pomeranz clan has to be Garland Buckeye.

Buckeye, born in 1897 in the miniscule town of Heron Lake, Minnesota, has the honor of appearing on both Baseball Reference and Football Reference. He bookended his football career with baseball, making his big league debut with the Washington Senators on June 19, 1918 against the New York Yankees at the Polo Grounds***, playing center and guard for the Chicago Tigers/Cardinals in 40 games over four years, before embarking on four seasons as a pitcher with Cleveland and the New York Giants. (He played football in other years as well, but only those four years were with NFL-recognized teams.)

I don’t typically think of a football center as having many overlapping physical attributes with a pitcher, but football in the 1920s was a different style of game and damn if that combination didn’t work for ‘ol Buckeye****. Beyond some comical offensive numbers for a pitcher - including a career slugging percentage of .368, he was a solid southpaw on the mound, with a wicked curveball. In his age 27, 28 and 29 seasons Buckeye put up 8.6 wins over 523 ⅓ innings, the highlight being his 1927 campaign when he started 25 games and threw 204 innings en route to a career-high single season bWAR of 3.5. For familial context, Drew has surpassed that single season total only twice in his own 11 year career - in 2016 over 170 innings and in 2017 over 173 innings. Out of respect for the dead, we won’t talk about Buckeye’s 1928. I hear turning 30 can be tough on even the best of us.

After his professional sports career wound down, Buckeye continued to live a life befitting his unusual name. Highlights from his retirement years include breeding and judging hunting dogs, serving as sales manager of the Rhinelander Brewery, being convicted and sentenced to jail time for gambling and corruption surrounding a ring of slot machines and having a daughter, Mary Lee Buckeye. Mary Lee married Herb Pomeranz, they had their son Mike, and Mike had Stu and Drew. Who doesn’t love a quaint rhyme to end a useless foray into the annals of baseball?

Interestingly, the only other great-grandfather/great-grandson combination in history also has Mariners ties. Jim Bluejacket*****, a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds and Brooklyn Tip-Tops in the 1910s, was the great-grandfather of former Mariner pitcher Bill Wilkinson, who was drafted by the club in 1983 and played for Seattle in 1985, 1987 and 1988.

Never let ‘em say the Mariners gave us nothing.

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Author’s note: Credit to Chris Rainey, who wrote Buckeye’s SABR biography, and to the very fine folks of Baseball Reference for the game logs, stats and ever-helpful Bullpen pages.

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*One of the few players the Mariners have added in the last four months, who signed a minor league contract and also has not made an appearance in the majors since 2021.

**What’s that you say? You burn, you pine, you perish for content about Stu Pomeranz? If you’re really nice, I will write a follow-up about sweet Stu.

***It was a rough start to Buck’s career - he issued six walks and allowed three singles over two innings. In the ninth he was pulled so that Walter Johnson (yes, that one) could pinch hit for him.

****According to Rainey, in his file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum he noted that he “played football at 270 pounds and then got down to 250 when in baseball shape.”

*****Bluejacket also holds the honor of being the first major league pitcher to win a game without throwing a single pitch - courtesy of a savvy pick-off in a late-inning relief appearance. And if you like watching Xander Bogaerts play baseball, you probably owe Bluejacket a thank you as he was instrumental in growing the popularity of the game in Aruba - where he lived and worked for 14 years in the 1930s. Also, evidently, Mickey Mantle’s grandfather lived with and worked for Bluejacket’s parents on their farm in Oklahoma. Baseball’s wild.