Baseball in Wartime is one of my favorite sites on the web.

This is a sad story.

In 1951 as a 19-year-old in C ball, Tumlinson led the team in BA had a SLG 68 points higher than anyone else on the team, and 118 points higher than anyone with more than 155 at bats. Only two batters on that team ended up with MLB experience, and neither was very good or played very long, so it's hard to compare him that way.

Even with the mediocre final numbers in his last season at Elmira, he outslugged Charlie Neal (who was a year older) by 66 points, and also outhit Bob Lillis (wow, that's what a terrrible MLB hitting line looks like) and a couple of guys with short careers. I mean, who knows what would have happened, but this was a guy with a very good shot at a MLB career of some sort, and a reasonable shot at it being a productive one.

The baseballsgreatestsacrifice.com page on Tumlinson has a great phrase from a newspaper story: The Dodger shortstop rapped out 10 hits in 21 times at bat to boost his mace mark to .373 [...] "Mace mark" is a great and stupid phrase.

Anyone know what % of drafted players played service ball? Service teams were a common destination for drafted baseball and football players in the 1950s. Was Tumlinson just unlucky or did was he not enough of a prospect to attract attention? Or maybe it was a hardass on his local draft board that influenced assignments?

While we're on the subject, Bob Neighbors.

Dodger-organization shortstops can't help but remind my of my late friend and colleague Lyle Olsen – the Dodgers just had a lot of great pro ballplayers stacked up in their system in those years.