Tiny Bonham

Ernie Bonham picked up the nickname "Tiny" the way most 215-pound right-handers do -- as a joke, and it never stopped being funny to the people who said it. He pitched for the New York Yankees from 1940 to 1946, went 79-50 in pinstripes, and put together one of the great forgotten seasons in franchise history: 21-5 with a 2.27 ERA in 1942, leading the American League outright in shutouts while tying for the league lead in complete games. He was still an active pitcher, with a 7-4 record for the Pirates, when an emergency appendectomy in September 1949 found cancer nobody knew was there. He died a week later.

From Ione to the Big Leagues

Bonham grew up in Ione, California, a gold-country town most people couldn't find on a map, and built a 6-foot-2, 215-pound frame that Sporting News publisher J.G. Taylor Spink once described as having "a torso like a blacksmith." He debuted for the Yankees on August 5, 1940, and immediately looked like he belonged -- 9-3 with a 1.90 ERA in twelve starts. That kind of number for a part-season rookie makes you want to call it his peak right there. It wasn't. He was just getting loose.

What set Bonham apart wasn't velocity. It was the forkball, a pitch most starters of his era never bothered to learn because it demands a grip few hands can manage. "It sinks and is a fine change of pace," he said of it once -- underselling, as usual, the pitch that turned a good fastball into a guessing game for hitters.

He went 9-6 with a 2.98 ERA in 1941, forgettable by the raw numbers, then took the ball in Game 5 of that year's World Series (Joe McCarthy's fifth different starter of the series) and threw a four-hitter, beating Brooklyn 3-1 to close out the championship. That's the version of Bonham the Yankees needed most -- not the guy who piles up strikeouts in June, the guy who doesn't blink in October.

The Best Year Nobody Remembers

1942 was the outlier. Bonham went 21-5 with a 2.27 ERA, second in the league behind Ted Lyons, and led the AL outright in shutouts while tying for the lead in complete games. He walked 24 batters in 226 innings -- barely one every nine frames -- and finished fifth in AL MVP voting, remarkable for a pitcher in an era when the writers rarely looked past position players.

He came back in 1943 to go 15-8 with a 2.27 ERA -- the exact same number as the year before -- while Spud Chandler took over as the staff ace and won MVP with a 1.64 mark. Bonham lost Game 2 of that World Series too, 4-3 to the Cardinals, the identical score from the year before, striking out nine over eight innings and losing anyway on a couple of long balls. The Yankees won the series in five games regardless, squaring the account from 1942.

Then came the part of the story that gets left out of the highlight reel. Draft-board doctors X-rayed Bonham's back and classified him 4-F, unfit for service, so while DiMaggio and most of the roster shipped out for the war, Bonham kept pitching -- 12-9 in 1944, 8-11 in 1945 (his first losing season), 5-8 in 1946. Whatever made 1942 possible never fully showed up again.

Pittsburgh, and What Came After

The Yankees traded Bonham to the Pirates on October 24, 1946 (he was 33, and the front office figured him washed up), sending him west for left-hander Cookie Cuccurullo and a player to be named later. He won 11 games for Pittsburgh in 1947 and stuck around into 1949, when a 7-4 start to the season turned into a hospital bed. Bonham pitched his last game on August 27, 1949, checked into the hospital on September 8 for what doctors expected was a routine appendectomy, and found intestinal cancer instead. He died on September 15, 1949, in Pittsburgh -- a month past his 36th birthday, one week after the surgery.

Bonham never got the chance to prove 1942 wasn't a fluke. Three years of wartime ball, a trade to Pittsburgh, and a cancer that hid behind an appendix scar took care of that. What's left is a 21-5 season that still holds up against anything a Yankees pitcher has done, and a forkball nobody bothered to ask him to teach them.