Fred Kipp

Fred was born in the small, 100-person town of Piqua, Kansas on October 1, 1931. Piqua is famous for being the birthplace of Buster Keaton. Kipp was the third child of Chuck and Ida Kipp and has an older brother Tom and an older sister Donna. He played baseball in the summer and basketball in the winter. He was a standout athlete and became the star of the Iola High basketball team. After World War II ended, the Piqua town baseball team resumed playing and Fred was 14 when he started pitching for the Piqua town against other local farming towns. He struck out men twice his age and got known for his knuckleball. When he was 18, Kipp hitchhiked to a New York Giants tryout in Cassville, Missouri. He was offered a position but decided to go to college instead.

The famous basketball coach Tex Winters recruited Fred to Kansas State University with a basketball scholarship. He transferred to Kansas State Teachers College (Emporia)[1] after one semester so that he could play basketball and baseball. He threw a no-hitter his Freshman year at Washburn University and then started playing on the Emporia Rangers town team in the summer of 1950. Besides playing better teams from Ft. Riley, Wichita and Topeka, he played the barnstorming Kansas City Monarchs. In the summers of 1951 and 1952, he played for the Chamberlain Chiefs in South Dakota and the Superior Knights in Nebraska.

With an invitation to try out for the Dodgers, Kipp took a 40-hour train ride to Vero Beach, Florida over Easter break from college in 1953. He went to spring training as a free agent and joined the Dodger organization. After graduating from Emporia, he started pitching for the Miami Sunsox in the Florida International League. He pitched poorly in Miami and didn't last a month before he was transferred to the Asheville Tourists in North Carolina. Once in the cool mountain air, he got hot. Fred found his groove and lead the league with a 2.24 ERA and earned a 15–5 record. The season went well but he got drafted into the army at the end of the season.

The Korean War was winding down when Fred entered basic training at Camp Rucker in Alabama. Many baseball players were drafted into the military at which generals would handpick the players for their divisional teams. Fred began pitching for the 136th Bearcats and won 10 straight games. Fred pitched against the St. Louis Cardinal “Vinegar Bend” Mizell – whom he would later play against in the majors – and many other major leaguers.

After getting out of the military to go to graduate school at the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley, Kipp was quickly back pitching for the Kearney Irishmen in the Nebraska International League. When Billy Martin of New York Yankee fame heard that Fred was pitching in the Great Plains, he found Fred and convinced him to play for the Goodland Tigers. Billy was in military duty in Ft. Carson and managed the Goodland team. Fred pitched well and lead the Tigers to some victories before Clay Bryant, the coach of the Mobile Bears, recruited Fred to the Southern Association. Fred ended up playing on three teams that summer and worked his way up to better teams.

The Mobile Bears were a AA farm team for the Dodgers and Kipp started playing with 7 weeks left in the season. He ended the season with a 4–2 record and lead the team into the playoffs. He beat the Birmingham Barons twice in the playoffs to win the league playoffs and earn the right to play in the Dixie Series against the winners of the Texas League. The Bears faced the Shreveport Sports in the Dixie Series and beat them in four straight games.

After the winning season, Clay Bryant convinced Fred to play winter ball in Caracas, Venezuela. The opportunity to make $1,000/month was a big pay raise, so he went but things didn't go well in Venezuela and he soon returned to the States after just one month.

The day after losing game 7 of the 1956 World Series, the team started their journey to Japan where they would play 19 games. 51 players, coaches, wives and friends of the Dodgers got on the plane that day and ended up flying 9,254 miles in 29 hours. With stops in LA, Maui, Honolulu, and Wake Island, they arrived in Tokyo with much fanfare. The Dodgers played many All Star Japanese teams and professional teams from Sapporo to Hiroshima.

Fred Kipp, Gil Hodges and Pee Wee Reese Tour Hiroshima, Japan.

While Kipp hadn't even pitched a regular season game for the Dodgers yet, he pitched more than any other pitcher on the Japan tour. Kipp brought a pitch to Japan that they had not seen before – his knuckle ball. The Japanese third baseman Atsushi Hadoka said, “Kipp is a hard pitcher to get to. I couldn’t hit any of his inside balls. They cut the corner sharp. They were puzzlers and I still don’t know if they were a knuckleball or a palm ball.” Japanese players called Kipp a “knuckleball artist”. Kipp ended up pitching complete games and struck out 26 batters in 43 innings.

Spring training went well for Kipp in Vero Beach and he again pitched some exhibition games against the Yankees where he faced Mickey Mantle in a rematch of the 1956 World Series. Kipp stayed with the team through the first couple weeks of the season, but was sent back to Montreal on April 27 before he made it to the mound. In Montreal, his sophomore year ended with an 8–17 record with 10 complete games and 99 strikeouts.

Throughout the season, there were rumors that he would be called up to the Dodgers, but he didn't get called up until the Dodgers could expand their roster in September. Kipp got his cup of coffee on September 10 at Wrigley Field against the Chicago Cubs. He pitched 4 innings in his debut, but gave up 6 hits and 4 runs. He stayed with the Brooklyn Dodgers until the very end and was at the final game at Ebbets Field on September 24, 1957.

After the 1957 season, Kipp decided to play winter ball in the Dominican Republic. He played for the Escogido Lions (Leones del Escogido) in the capital that was named Ciudad Trujillo at the time – later renamed Santo Domingo. Kipp became their pitching ace and was the first in the league to win 10 games in the 1957–58 season. He helped the Lions win the championship in the 1957–58 and 1959–60 seasons.

Kipp pitched alongside the young Juan Marichal and the Alou brothers. Kipp played with Juan before he pitched in the minor leagues and saw him grow into the dominant pitcher who won more games in the 1960s than any other player. He also saw the Alou brothers grow from teenagers to stars in the Majors. Ozzie Virgil, the first Dominican to reach the majors, was on the team with Kipp as well. These Dominican players were trailblazers that inspired generations of Dominican players who make up over 10% of the major league baseball players in 2016.

The Dominican teams were a mixture of expatriates and local talent. The Lions had many American players who were mainly from the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York/San Francisco Giants. From the Dodgers, Kipp's teammates were Norm Sherry, Ron Negray, Frank Howard, Stan Williams and Rudy Hernandez. From the Giants organization, he played with Willie McCovey, Willie Kirkland, and Bill White.

Kipp spent the 1959 season with the St. Paul Saints in the new American Association that consisted of 10 teams. Kipp was the workhorse in the rotation and started 30 games and pitched 213 innings. He struck out 125 batters and won a spot on the All Star team. He went 14-11 and was called up to the Dodgers on September 6 when the Dodgers were in a three-way pennant race with the Giants and Braves. Kipp pitched in two games during the pennant race and helped the Dodgers into a three-game playoff against the Braves. The Dodgers won the playoff and the World Series against the Chicago White Sox.