Yuma native to have book in Baseball HOF library

Kelly Cleaver’s work examining 1919 World Series, Black Sox scandal recognized

For anyone around the game of baseball, Cooperstown holds a special stigma.

Former Yuma resident and Yuma High graduate Kelly Cleaver will now see a piece of his work go into those halls as his book “Sorry Kid, I Don’t Much Feel Like Playing Today” has been accepted into the library at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

The book examines one of the most controversial periods in baseball, the 1919 World Series and the Black Sox scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of intentionally throwing the series in exchange for money. Cleaver breaks down each inning, at bat and play as he digs into what really happened on the field. He looks at if the play on the field could be an indication about who possibly was in on the fix and who wasn’t. Cleaver has always been around baseball in some fashion or another. He spent the better part of 16 years in Yuma from 1977 to 1993 and he was a 1981 graduate of Yuma High School. During his senior season as a Criminal, he said, he went the entire season without striking out.

After graduation he played baseball at Arizona Western College, and from there he moved on to play at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas.

He was also in the inaugural class of the Yuma Softball Hall of Fame.

It’s safe to say that he was never too far from the diamond.

In the late 80s and early 90s movies like ‘Eight Men Out’ and ‘Field of Dreams’ shed light on the scandal, and that got Cleaver thinking about it.

He put that away for a bit, but later on he spent four years researching the story before writing. The book finally published in 2011.

“The idea for a book like this started when I was in college,” Cleaver said. “I just didn’t get around to it until I was older. I researched that for about four years solid before I wrote a page. I made a summary and put everything in order.”

Many of the books on the subject focused solely on the crime part of the scandal and not the baseball part. The White Sox were among the top teams in the league in the late teens before World War I. After the war the team made it to the World Series again.

“I certainly had nothing to add

to that story, so I took a different look at it,” he said. “I actually looked at the ballgames. I tried to tell a story, but I also wanted a stats person to just love it.”

What those movies did was really look at the biggest star caught up in the scandal, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. Jackson has been demonized and defended by baseball fanatics alike over the years. He would be a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame, but he is serving a lifetime ban from baseball.

Cleaver looked at his play on the field, where he didn’t play horribly, but he believes that there were some red flags. Jackson led both teams with 12 hits in the eight-game series, but there were some suspect plays.

Jackson made a couple of mistakes in Game 6 that seldom happen in professional baseball, let alone to a player of his caliber.

“It’s very intriguing because Joe had all of the great stats,” he said. “His batting and just about everything (was great), but when you start looking at it play-by-play, his fielding and base running, you start scratching your head. You come to the conclusion that Joe did a little bit less than

his best. The one thing that really got me was that in Game 6, when they were down 4 games to 1, but in the eighth inning of that game Joe Jackson was on second base and one of the players hit the ball into the gap in the outfield. The right-centerfielder made a nice play on it. He doubled Joe off of second base. The next time when Joe got to second base it happened again. He got doubled-off twice in one game.”

The book is broken down into three parts. The first is about the pitching, the second is about the hitting and the third puts the stats altogether.

He wraps the book up with a plea for Buck Weaver, who he doesn’t believe had any involvement in the scandal. Despite laying out hundreds of pages of stats, Cleaver says he wasn’t trying to convince anybody to think one way or another.

“An individual reader can read this and make up their own mind,” he said. “I’m not trying to convince anybody. I’m just putting the facts out there.”

After going to a rigorous fact-checking process the book is now in the possession of the Hall of Fame. There is some procedural paperwork that needs to be done for the book to be officially introduced in the library, which should be finished shortly.