getting started

Firing up the Way Back Machine, we stop in 1935, 80 long years ago. That was the year in which Waynesboro’s Claude Passeau, one of Mississippi’s greatest pitchers, made his big league debut. He would win 162 games and make five All-Star teams. Also debuting in ’35 was Jim Bivin of Jackson. He won 160 fewer games in his career than Passeau and lasted only that one season. But Bivin did manage this noteworthy feat: He retired Babe Ruth on a ground ball in The Babe’s final at-bat. Shift gears and move on to 1945, the debut year of Boo Ferriss, the Shaw native who won 21 games as a rookie for the Boston Red Sox. In 1955, Don “The Corinth Comet” Blasingame played the first game in a nice career that spanned 12 seasons. In 1965, Jerry Moses of Yazoo City broke in; he would hang on for nine years, mostly as a backup catcher. Chet Lemon, a Jackson native, launched his career in 1975; he batted .273 over 16 big league seasons. On to 1985, when Jackson’s Curtis Ford broke in with the St. Louis Cardinals; he got a game-winning hit, off Lee Smith, no less, in his first at-bat on June 22. In 1995, Gulfport’s Matt Lawton began a 12-year MLB career that saw him make two All-Star teams and one Sports Illustrated cover. And in 2005, Paul Maholm, the former Mississippi State ace from Greenwood, made his debut. Recently released by Cincinnati, the 77-game winner is looking for another team. P.S. Art Gardner, the Madden native and longtime Major League Scouting Bureau scout, made his MLB debut in 1975. Gardner didn’t stick long in the majors. The high point of his playing career might have come five years later when he starred for the 1980 Denver Bears, a Triple-A Montreal Expos affiliate that won 92 games and is generally regarded as one of the greatest minor league clubs of all-time. On a roster that included Tim Raines, Tim Wallach, Bill Gullickson, Charlie Lea, Randy Bass and Jerry Manuel, Gardner hit .317 with 14 home runs, 64 RBIs, 11 triples and 26 steals.