Tursi to discuss his new book on NC baseball big-leaguers

From a Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center announcement

As the Los Angeles Dodgers start the new baseball season hoping to win their third consecutive World Series title, it seems like a good time to remember a Morehead City native who helped the team reach even greater heights more than 40 years ago.

Ben Wade didn’t display his real talent, as it turned out, on the pitching mound. Prone to wildness and home runs, he was merely an average major-league pitcher in a five-year career during which he bounced around the National League. He showed his real skill later, as a scout and then longtime scouting director for the Dodgers. Wade’s ability to project the type of players youngsters would become led to nine pennants, seven World Series appearances, and four titles.

Frank Tursi, Coastal Review’s founding editor and the author of a new book about North Carolina natives who played major-league baseball, will talk about Wade and his brother, Jake, also a big-league pitcher, on Saturday, April 25, at the Core Sound Museum Store, 806 Arendell St. in Morehead City. His book, “Tar Heel Boys of Summer: North Carolina’s Major League Ballplayers,” will be available for purchase, and museum members will get a 10% discount. Tursi will sign copies.

The stories of 34 big leaguers are featured in the book. Included are all seven Hall of Famers: Luke Appling of High Point, Rick Ferrell of Friendship in Guilford County, Jim “Catfish” Hunter of Hertford, Buck Leonard of Rocky Mount, Gaylord Perry of Williamston, Enos Slaughter of Roxboro and Hoyt Wilhelm of Huntersville. Tursi also tells the stories of players who almost made it to Cooperstown like Johnny Allen, the hot-headed orphan from Thomasville, and Ferrel’s brother, Wes, the dairy farmer with the Hollywood good looks.

At least 50 Black North Carolinians, like Leonard, played major-league ball during the time of the sport’s apartheid. They played in their own leagues, mostly unseen by white fans. Most never heard of Red Grier of Catawba County, who threw a no-hitter in a Black World Series 30 years before Don Larsen pitched his perfect game, or Charlie Smith of Hamlet, who could very well be the best hitter there ever was. Tursi tells their stories as well as those of other Negro Leaguers for the first time in his book.

Tursi, a journalist who lives in Swansboro, has spent almost 40 years roaming North Carolina writing about its people, culture and history. His book paints a picture of a state now long gone, he noted. “Collectively, these stories tell of a North Carolina of the early and mid-20th century,” he said. “It was a rural state of small towns and family farms where tobacco and cotton were kings.”

Baseball, he noted, was truly America’s Game, back then, played in every school yard and hamlet. In the era before free agents, few got rich playing it professionally, he said. “I hope these stories give readers a sense of what it was like when farmers and mill hands and fishermen’s sons, like the Wades, left the tobacco fields, mill villages and small towns to play a game, not for the money, really, but for the pure pleasure it brought them,” he said.

The book, Tursi’s fourth, also includes thumbnail sketches of all 501 North Carolinians who played in the majors – the most-extensive compendium compiled of native players – complete career pitching and batting statistics and Top 10 rankings in major offensive and pitching categories.