Marin baseball legend
Spring is here, and the sounds of baseball can be heard from local schoolyards and playgrounds all the way to the Major League Baseball spring training facilities. There have been a number of major league players who have called Marin County home, but the first was Samuel Blake Chapman, a star center fielder for the old Philadelphia Athletics. Chapman was born in Tiburon on April 11, 1916, and attended Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, where he was a standout athlete playing five varsity sports. He loved baseball and said, “My favorite team was the old San Francisco Seals. I used to take two ferryboats across the San Francisco Bay and a long streetcar ride to get to the ballpark to watch the Seals play.”
After a stellar high school career, his varsity football coach, Roy Riegels — a Cal graduate and football player
— sent him to the University of California at Berkeley to look around. He liked it, and decided to enroll. At UC Berkeley, Chapman favored football over baseball, and became the team’s star running back. In his senior year, Nicknamed the “Tiburon Terror,” he helped lead Cal to an 9-0-1 season, earning a trip to the Rose Bowl, where they defeated Alabama, 13-0. Incredibly, that turned out to be the California Bears’ last Rose Bowl win.
In May 1938, fresh out of college, Chapman turned down a chance to play professional football for the Washington Redskins, instead signing with the American League’s Philadelphia Athletics baseball team. He soon became a star center fielder both offensively and defensively, with the 1941 season being the best of his career. That year he batted .322, hit 25 home runs and drove in 106 runs.
Just when his career was peaking, World War II came along and Chapman enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He served as chief specialist in athletics at the Norfolk Naval Training Station in 1942, then transferred to Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1943 where he earned his “wings” as a torpedo bomber pilot. Chapman would eventually serve as a flight instructor for the Navy at Waldron Field in Texas.
After the war, he re-signed with the Athletics, and was an all-star in 1946. He played five more years for the Athletics and was a solid, all-around player until being traded to the Cleveland Indians at the end of the 1951 season. He retired at the end of that season with a career batting average of .266, 1,329 hits, 180 home runs and 773 RBIs. On retiring he said, “I could’ve gone back to Cleveland in 1952, but I had four children by then, and I was always traveling. I figured it was time to get out.”
Chapman returned to California, and went into the building contracting business for a short while before returning to minor league baseball and playing three years for the Oakland Oaks in the Pacific Coast League.
Chapman left baseball for good after the 1954 season. Afterward, he worked 17 years for the state of California as an inspector in air pollution control in the San Francisco Bay Area, utilizing his college training as a chemistry major.
In the long history of Philadelphia baseball, few players enjoyed such a loyal and enthusiastic following as the former A’s outfielder.
History Watch is written by Scott Fletcher, a volunteer at the Marin History Museum, marinhistory.org. Images included in History Watch are available for purchase by calling 415-382-1182 or by email at info@ marinhistory.org.