Late Bloomers: Claude Passeau

Claude Passeau didn’t like baseball all that much.

This is no repeat of Jeff King’s story, the former number one overall pick who played in the big leagues just long enough to fully vest his major league pension, and then immediately quit in the middle of the season. Passeau didn’t hate baseball like King did, he just routinely preferred doing something else, like fishing, or hunting near his home in Mississippi.

That probably explains why it took so long before he arrived in the big leagues. In high school Passeau claimed he was the 12th man on a 12-man team, and suffered a hunting accident that left two fingers on his left (non-pitching) hand permanently folded toward his palm. The injury was part of the reason he was turned down when he tried to enlist in the Navy at the age of 16, the other reason being they realized he was lying about his age when they noticed he couldn’t shave.

As a result, he got into other sports, particularly football and basketball, with baseball being distinctly third of the three sports he played in high school. There were no big league scouts looking at him. Colleges were, though, at least for his other athletic gifts. Passeau accepted a scholarship to little Millsaps College in the state capital of Jackson and quickly became their star quarterback. As a freshman, Passeau didn’t even go out for the baseball team. He played basketball when football season ended, and ran track in the Spring.

Two things changed his mind. The first was that scholarship students were expected to either be actively playing a sport or else they had to work sweeping floors in the dorms or serving food in the cafeteria. Those weren’t appealing options at all, so he caved in to the baseball coach’s request and joined the team. He was so disinterested in it that he later admitted purposely dogging it in practice so he’d be left alone. His refusal to take batting practice or to play hard at any position forced the coach to put him on the mound as a batting practice pitcher, where he threw so hard it made the other players mad at him.