Birdie Cree

A 5-foot-6, 150-pound outfielder from a Pennsylvania coal town hit .348 for the Highlanders in 1911, with 22 triples and 48 stolen bases thrown in. It's one of the best individual seasons in the franchise's pre-Ruth history, and almost nobody remembers it happened. His name was William Franklin Cree, though everyone in baseball just called him Birdie.

A Bird at Penn State

Cree earned the nickname before he ever put on pinstripes. He arrived at Penn State on a scholarship in the fall of 1904, tried football for three days, dislocated his collarbone, and switched to baseball the following spring instead. In his first game for the Penn State nine, he reportedly hit for the cycle -- a homer, a triple, a double, a single -- and a teammate watching from the bench supposedly yelled, "he's a bird, that's what he is." The name stuck for the rest of his life.

He graduated in 1908 with a science degree and taught eighth grade in the offseasons even after he made the majors (a schoolteacher moonlighting as a big-league outfielder, which tells you something about what ballplayers actually earned in 1908).

Learning the League

Cree debuted for the New York Highlanders on September 17, 1908, at 25 years old -- already a college graduate, already older than most rookies. The early returns were modest. He hit .269 in a 21-game cup of coffee that first year, then .261 as a semi-regular in 1909. By 1910, playing a full season for the first time, he found something: .285 with 16 triples and 29 stolen bases, the shape of the player he was about to become.

New York in those years was a mess worth watching. Hal Chase ran the infield with a glove nobody else could match and a reputation nobody could trust, and by 1911 he was running the whole team as player-manager. The results were unremarkable -- a 76-76 record, sixth place, 37.5 games behind Connie Mack's Athletics. Cree's season, by contrast, was anything but.

The Season Nobody Noticed

In 1911, Cree hit .348. He legged out 22 triples, still a franchise record for a right-handed hitter. He stole 48 bases, third-most in the American League. He finished in the top five in the league in batting average, slugging, total bases, triples and steals -- a five-category run that most Hall of Famers never put together in a single year. The writers who voted on the Chalmers Award, the pre-MVP era's answer to Most Valuable Player, tied him for sixth with Tris Speaker. Ty Cobb won that year, hitting .420, so nobody was catching him. But Cree finished ahead of players whose plaques now hang in Cooperstown.

None of it made headlines. The 1911 Highlanders went 76-76 and finished sixth, and individual brilliance on a .500 team doesn't sell papers in any era. A single September afternoon against the St. Louis Browns says as much about that team's whole identity as anything: the Highlanders stole 15 bases in one game, Cree and Chase four apiece, and it barely registered outside the box score. Speed was how a team without power tried to matter. Cree just happened to be the best at it on a roster nobody was watching.

Read the full account of that year in the 1911 season recap -- Cree's average anchors it, and it's still one of the more remarkable numbers buried in the franchise's early record book.

The Pitch That Changed Everything

On June 29, 1912, Boston's Buck O'Brien hit Cree with a pitch that broke his wrist. Cree had been hitting .332 through 50 games, on pace to match or beat his 1911 season. He never got the chance. The wrist ended his year, and it didn't heal clean -- 1913 brought a diminished Cree, batting .270 in 154 games, still playing every day but without the pop that had made him dangerous.

A broken bone in a different era, treated with a different level of medicine, cost him more than a season. It cost him the version of himself that finished sixth in an MVP vote.

Sold, Revived, and Bought Back -- Days Before Babe Ruth

After the wrist-hampered 1913 season, the Yankees let Cree go -- released to the Baltimore Orioles of the International League, a demotion that read like the end of a career. Manager Jack Dunn signed him for $4,500 and put him in a lineup that included Bert Daniels, Neal Ball, Freddy Parent, and a 19-year-old left-hander who could also swing the bat (Babe Ruth, in case the name needs an introduction).

Cree found his stroke in Baltimore. He hit .356, the Orioles built a 17-game lead in the International League, and the whole operation looked unstoppable -- until the Federal League's new Baltimore Terrapins started stealing away Dunn's paying customers. Dunn needed cash more than he needed a winning roster, so he started selling.

On July 6, 1914, the Yankees sent outfielder Bill Holden and cash to Baltimore to get Cree back. The deal closed July 9. That same week, Dunn sold Ruth, along with pitcher Ernie Shore and catcher Ben Egan, to the Boston Red Sox -- the transaction that put the most famous player in baseball history on a major-league roster for good. Cree finished 1914 back in New York, hitting .309 in 78 games. He'd shared a Baltimore clubhouse with the man who'd make his own forgotten season look even smaller by comparison.

The Last Season, and After

Cree played out 1915 as a part-timer, hitting just .215 in 75 games but still drawing enough walks (37 of them) to post a .358 on-base mark -- a hitter whose eye outlasted his legs. He was 32. The Yankees didn't bring him back for 1916, and he didn't play in the majors again.

He went home to Pennsylvania, taught school, and eventually became a bank cashier in Sunbury. He died there on November 8, 1942, after a ten-week illness, and he's buried in Pomfret Manor Cemetery -- a long way from Hilltop Park, where he'd once been the best player on a team nobody paid attention to.

Nobody remembers the 1911 Highlanders. They finished sixth, their player-manager was more famous for his glove and his grudges than his standings, and the season is a footnote sandwiched between two much bigger stories in baseball history. But for one year, a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania who stood 5-foot-6 was one of the five best hitters in the American League. He just picked the wrong team, and the wrong decade, to do it in.