John Simmons

Basketball or Baseball?

John Simmons

I had never heard of John Simmons before this replay.

His name only stood out to me because of a 1949 Washington Senators game that I recently played. As you probably know, I’m playing a bit faster than the blog articles are coming out.

Simmons was a pretty obscure baseball player, as we can see from his Baseball Reference Bullpen biography:

Simmons did have a basketball career as well, though it doesn’t seem to have lasted long. This is from his Wikipedia page:

It’s not every day that you see a baseball player on Wikipedia pictured wearing a basketball jersey. I figured that I should investigate.

New York University

Simmons played college at New York University. There are a few early articles about him playing baseball, such as this:

From Daily News (New York), May 7, 1942, page 52

I mean, this is so obscure that I can’t even figure out what position he played.

Interestingly, though, it was easier for me to find photos of Simmons playing basketball:

From The Daily News (New York), March 5, 1942, page 64

From The Daily News (New York), December 20, 1942, page 90

Now, if you look closely at Simmons’ Minor Leauge page at Baseball Reference, you’ll notice that he is also listed as playing for the Fond du Lac Panthers in the Class D Wisconsin State League in 1942:

17 is pretty young for a kid who was already playing basketball for NYU, and I also had to wonder how he was still eligible to play college ball after two professional appearances. I figured I wouldn’t be able to find any newspaper evidence of this.

Actually, I did find a little bit, though it’s not much. This story spread around the Wisconsin newspapers in June 1942:

From The Capital Times (Madison, WI), June 8, 1942, page 11

Well, that’s the wrong New York team, but it’s close enough.

Anyway, Simmons stayed at college through the end of the 1942-43 basketball season. Here’s a short clipping from an article about NYU’s lost to Georgetown that year in the NCAA tournament, which was far from prestigious at the time:

From The Daily News (New York), March 25, 1943, page 60

Simmons then disappears from the New York newspapers, until he makes a quiet reappearance in this 1945 article about Al Grenert, a career minor leaguer:

From The Sunday News (New York), February 11, 1945, page 22

Well, now we kind of know what happened to Simmons during the war.

Minor Leagues

This is where our story splits into half.

We’ll start off with the baseball stuff. Simmons bounced around a bit in 1946 after returning home from the war, but found a home with the Norfolk Tars in 1947:

From Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, April 20, 1947, page 54

Simmons played well for Norfolk.

From The Daily Press (Newport News, VA), August 6, 1947, page 6

In fact, Simmons was so good with Norfolk that he helped propel the club into the Shaughnessy Series, which I don’t think is a thing anymore:

From The Daily Press (Newport News, VA), September 23, 1947, page 10

Simmons was impressive enough to be poached into the Brooklyn organization, which led him to Montreal in 1948:

From The Montreal Star, February 12, 1948, page 29

Simmons had hit .285 / .376 / .434 in Class B Norfolk, and wound up hitting .296 / .372 / .412 for Class AAA Montreal — which is almost certainly what led the Senators to draft him:

From The Evening Star (Washington DC), November 10, 1948, page C1

Simmons, however, seems to have struggled in spring training in 1949, as shown in these two brief pieces:

From The Evening Star (Washington DC), March 21, 1949, page 14

From The Evening Star (Washington DC), March 26, 1949, page B15

That’s not exactly an article to build your confidence.

Simmons did play out the season for Washington in 1949, though he never showed the talent he displayed in Montreal. He was back in the minors at age 25, spent 1950 with three different teams, and really never regained his batting eye, finally ending his career with Montgomery in the Sally League in 1954.

Basketball

Of course, the interesting thing about Simmons is that he also had a professional basketball career.

This is where things become a little bit tricky. The old Boston Celtics didn’t exactly have the best media coverage in the world — and Simmons apparently went by the name Johnny Simmons in the basketball world.

This is the earliest mention of his professional basketball career that I could find:

From The Boston Globe, October 25, 1946, page 22

Simmons apparently was a better basketball player than a baseball player, if this article is any indication:

From The Boston Globe, November 20, 1946, page 21

Johnny played together on the team with his brother Connie — and it seems that Connie was probably the better of the two.

From The Boston Globe, January 11, 1947, page 4

Unfortunately, though, Johnny didn’t quite have what it took to make it in basketball. While Connie enjoyed an 11-year career in the BAA/NBA, Johnny seems to not have played professional basketball again.

He was good enough to be a fringe player at the highest level in two sports, but, sadly, was not quite good enough to stay.