Stan Coveleski: The Hall of Famer Who Chose This Ground

1889–1984 · South Bend from 1929

Stanislaus Anthony Kowalewski was born July 13, 1889, in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, the youngest of five boys, four of whom played professional baseball; his brother Harry won 81 major-league games. Stan was a coal miner at twelve, earning $3.75 a week. He signed with Lancaster of the Tri-State League and went 23–11 in 272 innings in 1909, won twenty games with a 2.53 earned run average for Atlantic City in 1912, and finished that season with Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics. Two 300-inning years at Spokane followed; Portland of the Pacific Coast League traded five players to get him, and it was at Portland that he made himself. On the suggestion of Joe McGinnity and Harry Krause he took up the spitball — tobacco juice first, then alum, which he kept gummy in his mouth and worked into his first two fingers. The pitch broke three ways: down, out, and down-and-out. In 1915 he went 17–17 with a 2.67 earned run average and led the Coast League in games pitched.

Cleveland bought him before the 1916 season, and he was a front-line pitcher at once: 15–13 as a rookie, then 19 wins with a 1.81 earned run average and a league-leading nine shutouts in 1917, 22 wins and a 1.82 mark in 1918 — with a 19-inning complete-game win over the Yankees on May 24 of that year — and 24–12 in 1919. When baseball banned the spitball in 1920, Coveleski stood among the seventeen pitchers grandfathered and allowed to throw it for the rest of his career. His 1920 season was played through grief: his wife Mary died on May 28, and in August he was Cleveland's pitcher in the game in which Carl Mays's pitch struck Ray Chapman, who died the next day. Coveleski finished 24–14 with a 2.49 earned run average, second in the league, and led the American League with 133 strikeouts.

The 1920 World Series is his monument. Against the Brooklyn Robins, in a best-of-nine series, Coveleski threw three complete-game five-hit victories — Games 1, 4 and 7 — the last of them a 3–0 shutout over Burleigh Grimes, himself a grandfathered spitballer. His earned run average for the series was 0.67, still carried as a World Series record, and he walked two men in twenty-seven innings. He won 23 more games in 1921, his fourth straight season of 22 or more, and took his first earned run average title in 1923. Traded to Washington after a 15–16 season in 1924, he answered with 20–5 and a second earned run average title, 2.84, in 1925, though Pittsburgh beat him in both of his World Series starts that fall. A sore arm ended it: Washington released him in 1927, the Yankees released him in August 1928, and the career closed at 215–142 with a 2.89 earned run average across fourteen seasons. The Baseball-Reference Bullpen prints the line a game lower on both sides, 214–141; the Hall of Fame and SABR figures are the ones printed here.

The South Bend tie is not birth and not play — it is a life. In 1929 Coveleski moved his family to South Bend, drawn by the chance to coach a boys' amateur team, and he stayed fifty-five years. He bought the Napier Street house from the Napieralskis, ran the Coveleski Service Station on the West Side until the Depression closed it, and gave free pitching lessons to neighborhood boys behind his garage. His son Jack died in 1937. He fished at Pinhook Park. Lawrence Ritter interviewed him here for The Glory of Their Times in 1966, and Eugene Murdock recorded an oral history with him in South Bend on May 13, 1974. The Veterans Committee elected him to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969, and the National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame followed in 1976. He died on March 20, 1984, in a South Bend nursing home, aged ninety-four, then the oldest living Hall of Famer, and he is buried in St. Joseph's Cemetery in South Bend — Retrosheet's record gives Section 3, Lot 100. The ballpark that carries his name stands in the Sports leg's venue record; the man himself belongs here: the greatest player ever to make this city his home.

Sources

1. Daniel R. Levitt, SABR biography of Stan Coveleski — the Shamokin childhood, the Lancaster, Atlantic City, Spokane and Portland years, the spitball's making, the Cleveland and Washington seasons, the 1920 World Series, the 1929 move to South Bend and the life that followed.
2. National Baseball Hall of Fame — the 1969 Veterans Committee election and the career line (215–142, 2.89); Baseball-Reference Bullpen — the variant line of 214–141.
3. Retrosheet and the Thornley cemetery record — burial in St. Joseph's Cemetery, South Bend, Section 3, Lot 100.
4. Bill Moor, South Bend News-Times, April 25, 2025 — the Pinhook Park fishing and the South Bend remembrance.