Appalachian Figures
On an overcast October afternoon in 1925, a rookie pitcher with only a handful of big league innings stepped onto the mound at Griffith Stadium in Washington. The Pittsburgh Pirates were clawing back into the World Series. Player manager Bucky Harris of the Washington Senators called for a reliever: Win Ballou, a right hander from the hills above Williamsburg in Whitley County, Kentucky.
Ballou had logged barely twenty seven regular season innings for the Senators that year, yet in Game Five he came in long enough to fan Hall of Fame third baseman Pie Traynor and help turn a strikeout and caught stealing double play that briefly stemmed the Pirates rally. For a few minutes the coal camp kid from Mount Morgan stood in the brightest spotlight the sport could offer.
Major league box scores and encyclopedias usually reduce Noble Winfred Ballou to a compact stat line. Listed as five feet ten, one hundred seventy pounds, right handed on both sides of the plate, he appeared in ninety nine major league games between 1925 and 1929 with the Washington Senators, St. Louis Browns, and Brooklyn Robins, winning nineteen and losing twenty with a 5.11 earned run average across 329 and two thirds innings. They also record that he was born in Mount Morgan, Kentucky, on 30 November 1897, and that he died in San Francisco, California, in the last days of January 1963.
Those entries are accurate as far as they go, but they miss the Appalachian story that shaped him. To understand Win Ballou you have to go back to the narrow ridge west of Williamsburg, to the short lived coal camp that shared its name with the mountain itself, and to the world of semipro mill and coal company baseball that gave a Whitley County boy a path to the majors.
Mount Morgan: a coal camp above Williamsburg
Modern maps treat Mount Morgan as a geographic feature: a summit in Whitley County, listed at about 1,768 feet above sea level on United States Geological Survey topographic sheets and plotted at roughly 36.74 degrees north and 84.19 degrees west on the Williamsburg quadrangle. In Ballou’s childhood that ridge held more than a contour line. It was the site of the Mount Morgan Coal Company’s camp, one of several Jellico seam operations that ringed Williamsburg in the early twentieth century.
A national directory of coal operators published around the turn of the century lists “Mount Morgan Coal Co., Williamsburg” alongside familiar Whitley County names such as East Tennessee Coal, Cockill Coal, Main Jellico Mountain Coal, Procter Coal at Red Ash, and others. A later statewide index of Kentucky mining accidents includes an entry for a miner at “MOUNT MORGAN COAL,” another small reminder that crews were cutting coal there and that the mine was dangerous work like so many others in the Jellico field.
A historic marker in downtown Williamsburg condenses that era into a single paragraph, noting that the town’s growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was tied to coal companies with names like Gatliff, Bon Hollow, Mount Morgan, East Tennessee, Red Ash, and Proctor. In other words, Mount Morgan was both a physical ridge and a corporate presence, a cluster of houses and mine structures clinging to the mountain above town.
Local genealogical work on the Broyles family even preserves the paper trail of land sales to the Mount Morgan Coal Company in Whitley County. Combined with the industrial directories and accident records, the picture is clear. When the baseball encyclopedias say that Ballou was born at Mount Morgan, Kentucky, they are not referring to a tidy farming village. They are pointing to a coal camp perched on a mountain, reachable, as later writers put it, only by mule or on foot from the valley below.
By the time of the 1920 United States census, Mount Morgan Road appears as a distinct enumeration route in Whitley County, with entries for families living along the road in what would have been the camp or its immediate surroundings. One of those heads of household is listed as “Ballou Sam,” evidence that branches of the Ballou family were living on Mount Morgan Road within the coal community itself.
The Ballou family and a debated birth date
Baseball references usually give his full name as Noble Winfred Ballou, although some modern compilers call him Noble Winfield Ballou. Family history sites connected to Whitley County list him as a child of William Riley Ballou and Sallie Jane Mahan, a Williamsburg area couple who married in 1890 and raised a large family that included several sons, among them Emitte, Orin Quincy, and Noble Winfred.
There is even a small discrepancy about when he was born. Major league system biographies, including MLB’s official player page, give 30 November 1897 as his birth date. A FamilySearch tree entry for Sallie Jane Mahan, by contrast, lists “Noble Winfred Ballou, 1898–1963” among her children. Given the weight of contemporary baseball records and later obituaries that treat him as sixty five at his death in January 1963, the 1897 date is more widely accepted, but the family tree reminds us that even seemingly simple biographical facts can shift depending on which record set you privilege.
The one thing all the records agree on is place. Whether they call his middle name Winfred or Winfield, and whether they use 1897 or 1898, MLB, Baseball Reference, Baseball America, The Baseball Cube, and regional reference works all identify his birthplace as Mount Morgan in Whitley County, Kentucky.
From coal camp to Harlan’s diamonds
The coal seam that gave Mount Morgan its name did not last. Later writers have pointed out that the mine had closed not long after Ballou’s birth and that the camp itself was hollowed out by family feuds and raids by revenue agents chasing local bootleggers. At some point, the Ballou family left the ridge above Williamsburg for another kind of coal town deeper in the mountains.
By the nineteen teens and early nineteen twenties Ballou was in Harlan County, pitching for the Harlan Tigers and for a dizzying circuit of semipro coal camp and factory teams across southeastern Kentucky and eastern Tennessee. Artist and baseball historian Gary Cieradkowski, who has done more than anyone to track Ballou’s Appalachian years, describes him as a “pitcher for hire,” a young man whose side arm curve and fading knuckleball were available to any club that had a few dollars and a ride.
That picture finds a rare contemporary corroboration in an obituary printed decades later. When Harlan coal operator Earl Jameson died in 1954, the Harlan Daily Enterprise noted that he had once been “a professional baseball player with Nobe Ballou and Earl Combs here in Harlan.” Combs, a fellow mountain boy from Owsley County, would go on to the Hall of Fame with the New York Yankees. Jameson stayed in the coal business. Ballou, the third name in that sentence, bridged those worlds, playing shoulder to shoulder with a future Yankee great while still tied to the coal economy.
If you follow local Facebook baseball history groups and the Mountain Sports Hall of Fame materials today, you find Ballou reappearing as “Nobe” or “Win,” remembered as another major leaguer from the hills, a Harlan star who moved from coal camp company teams to college ball and then to the professional ranks. The fact that those memories survive mostly in informal online posts rather than in big league histories tells you something about whose stories are usually preserved and whose are not.
Eastern Kentucky State Teachers College
Sometime during those years of coal camp ball and mill team freelancing, Ballou caught the attention of coaches at Eastern Kentucky State Normal School, which later became Eastern Kentucky State Teachers College and, still later, Eastern Kentucky University. Major league reference works list Eastern Kentucky as his college. Narrative histories of his career explain that he was recruited to Richmond after dominating for the Harlan Tigers and other independent clubs. When Eastern’s squad faced the Chattanooga Lookouts of the Southern Association in an exhibition contest, Ballou pitched so well that the professional club’s management took notice.
What happened next fits a familiar pattern for Appalachian players in that era. Formal scouting networks were thin in coal country. Opportunities flowed instead through barnstorming games, industrial leagues, and one off exhibitions where a local phenom could be matched against a traveling professional nine. Ballou’s performance against Chattanooga was strong enough that the Lookouts offered him a contract. Accepting it meant leaving the familiar mine and mill diamond circuit and entering organized professional baseball.
Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and the road to Washington
Baseball Reference’s minor league register, echoed in Wikipedia and other compiled sources, places Ballou in the Southern Association and the lower minor leagues by the early 1920s, including time with the Vicksburg Hill Billies in the Cotton States League. Reporters at the time sometimes framed him as a tough Appalachian right hander from the hills who had learned his craft on rough diamonds, a useful image for a pitcher trying to stand out in a crowded talent pool.
What matters for Whitley and Harlan County is that by 1925 his road out of the coal camps had carried him from local semipro contests through Eastern Kentucky’s program and into a contract with the Washington Senators, the reigning champions of the American League. Club owner Clark Griffith shipped two veterans to St. Louis and, in one of the smaller deals of that season, acquired a relatively unknown pitcher named Win Ballou.
He made his major league debut on 24 August 1925 for the Senators. In the regular season he worked in ten games as a rookie reliever. That might have been the end of his story, a brief cup of coffee in the big leagues, if not for that October series against Pittsburgh.
A Whitley County arm in the 1925 World Series
In Game Five of the 1925 World Series, with the Senators trying to clinch back to back championships, Washington manager Bucky Harris turned to Ballou in the seventh inning. Press accounts described him as a rookie who had pitched only twenty seven and two thirds innings that season, a marginal figure in the staff.
The Pirates had already seized the lead when Ballou entered. He struck out Pie Traynor, one of the best third basemen of his era, and on the same play catcher Muddy Ruel caught Kiki Cuyler breaking for home, completing a rare strikeout and caught stealing double play that momentarily hushed the Pittsburgh bats. Washington newspapers that week carried his coal country surname to readers far from Whitley County and Harlan.
He appeared again in Game Six. Box score summaries preserved on Baseball Reference and Baseball Almanac record that he threw one and two thirds innings of scoreless relief across the two games and did not allow a hit, although the Senators ultimately lost the series in seven games. For a coal camp child who had once been reachable only by mule path, it was a remarkable ascent.
The Browns, the Robins, and a move west
The following February, Washington traded Ballou to the St. Louis Browns. In 1926 he appeared in forty three games, winning eleven, which was second best on a club that finished a distant seventh in the American League. His work was often in relief, a role that fit his durable arm and willingness to pitch whenever asked. He pitched less frequently for the Browns in 1927, and by 1928 he was in the American Association with the Milwaukee Brewers, winning fourteen games in what was then one of the top minor leagues.
In 1929 he returned to the majors for one more season with the Brooklyn Robins, appearing in twenty five games. The stats say that he was “ineffective” that year and that his major league career ended at age thirty one. The numbers are not wrong. His earned run average ballooned. He finished his big league time with nineteen wins, twenty losses, and a relief pitcher’s mix of spot starts and bullpen work.
Yet the story did not stop there. As the official biographies note in a single sentence, Ballou then went west and continued to pitch professionally in the Pacific Coast League for fourteen more seasons, extending his pro career from 1922 all the way to 1944. That fact alone places him among the iron men of his generation.
Old Pard and the Pacific Coast League
In California and the Pacific Northwest, Win Ballou became “Old Pard,” a veteran reliever whose dependability earned him the respect of managers, teammates, and fans. Baseball cards from the early 1930s, including a 1932 Zeenut card of Ballou with the Los Angeles Angels, preserve his image from this phase of his career. The Trading Card Database and similar sites reproduce those images and list the same bare facts that the stat books do: born in Mount Morgan, Kentucky, on 30 November 1897, died in San Francisco on 29 or 30 January 1963.
Wikipedia, drawing from Baseball Reference’s minor league register, highlights two PCL seasons in particular. In 1931, pitching for the Los Angeles Angels, Ballou won twenty four and lost thirteen. Four years later, with the San Francisco Seals, he went eighteen and eight. These were frontline numbers in a league that many contemporaries regarded as only a half step below the majors.
Gary Cieradkowski’s illustrated biography collects many of the stories that California writers and players told about Ballou. Teammates remembered that he could sit in the bullpen half asleep and still be trusted to enter a game cold, throw a handful of warmup pitches, and get outs with his side arm delivery and knuckling fadeaway. Managers like Jack Lelivelt and Lefty O’Doul praised his refusal to complain about injuries or overwork. Young outfielder Dom DiMaggio, future Boston Red Sox star and brother of Joe, later named Ballou as one of the players he most admired because he always answered the call regardless of his physical condition.
These anecdotes are colored by nostalgia and legend, but they are anchored in contemporary box scores and newspaper accounts. A 1938 California newspaper, the Contra Costa Independent, reported that “Win Ballou pitched” for a local semipro club, evidence that even late in his career he was still in demand on West Coast diamonds beyond the PCL schedule.
San Francisco fans embraced Old Pard so thoroughly that in 1938 the Seals held a “Win Ballou Day” on Independence Day, taking up a cash collection for him during a doubleheader. Contemporary coverage, quoted in later histories, recorded that the Depression era crowd scraped together more than seven hundred sixty dollars, a substantial sum, and that Ballou responded in character by coming in out of the bullpen to strike out batter Hugh Luby on four pitches to clinch a win.
Coming home, then heading west again
In the early 1940s Ballou briefly left baseball to work in a war industry plant, then returned to the Seals for two more seasons before finally retiring as a player in 1944, by then in his mid forties. His long time home by that point was San Francisco. He spent his nights in the years after retirement at taverns frequented by sportswriters and old ballplayers, telling stories from his Appalachian youth and his Coast League prime.
One of those stories involves a short lived attempt to go back to Kentucky. According to Cieradkowski, in the late 1950s Ballou announced that he wanted to return to “his roots in the hills of Kentucky.” His friends in San Francisco gave him a proper sendoff. Within about six months, however, he was back in California. The hills, he told them, were “dull” now, and his old cronies were gone.
He died in San Francisco in late January 1963. Baseball Almanac’s list of major leaguers who died in California gives the date as 29 January 1963. Baseball Reference’s seasonal death roll and some other compilers list 30 January. Whichever date you choose, he was sixty five years old, and his funeral, held in San Francisco, featured a line of pallbearers drawn entirely from the baseball world that had become his second home.
Remembering Win Ballou in Whitley County and the coalfields
For many years, the only people who remembered that the veteran Coast League reliever and former Senator had been born on a Kentucky coal ridge were his family and a handful of local sports fans. That has begun to change.
A 2017 column in The News Journal of Williamsburg was titled in the form of a question: “Did You Know: Williamsburg’s own Win Ballou made history by appearing in the 1925 World Series with the Washington Senators.” It explicitly claimed him as a Williamsburg and Whitley County native, noted his college career at Eastern Kentucky, and summarized his major league and Pacific Coast League work, bringing his story back into the local conversation. Local history and baseball groups on social media now circulate photos and short biographies under headings like “Another Major Leaguer From Our Area,” using both his childhood nickname “Nobe” and his professional name “Win.”
Seen from the ridge above Williamsburg, Ballou’s career looks less like a curious footnote and more like an Appalachian path through early twentieth century American baseball. He grew up in a coal company world whose companies show up in industrial directories and accident lists but rarely in sports histories. He learned to pitch in Harlan coal camps and on semi organized town teams. He parlayed an Eastern Kentucky college opportunity and a barnstorming win over a Southern Association club into a shot at the majors.
The record book remembers him as a journeyman reliever with modest numbers. Appalachia can remember him as something else. He was one of the boys from the coalfields who carried the names of Mount Morgan, Williamsburg, and Harlan onto World Series box scores and PCL scorecards, living proof that the narrow roads out of the coal camps could lead somewhere very different from where they began.
Sources and further reading
Major league and minor league statistical profiles of Win Ballou, including birth place, dates, college affiliation, and career line, can be found at MLB.com, Baseball Reference, Baseball America, The Baseball Cube, This Day in Baseball, SABR’s player page for Win Ballou, and the Completely Kentucky Wiki entry which emphasizes his Mount Morgan and Whitley County roots.This Day In Baseball+6MLB.com+6Baseball Reference+6
Narrative accounts of his Appalachian and Pacific Coast League career, including his upbringing in a coal camp on Mount Morgan, his time with Harlan teams, his Eastern Kentucky recruitment, and his long tenure with the Los Angeles Angels and San Francisco Seals, are developed most fully in Gary Cieradkowski’s illustrated essay “Win Ballou: Living up to his name” at StudioGaryC and related pieces, as well as in local features such as The News Journal’s “Williamsburg’s own Win Ballou made history by appearing in the 1925 World Series with the Washington Senators,” and social media posts from the Mountain Sports Hall of Fame and regional baseball history groups.Facebook+4Studio Gary C+4Studio Gary C+4
Contemporary primary sources for his playing career include World Series coverage and box scores preserved in the Society for American Baseball Research’s Games Project account of Game Five of the 1925 World Series, box score compilations from Retrosheet and Baseball Reference, and newspaper items such as the 4 August 1938 Contra Costa Independent notice that “Win Ballou pitched” in local California play.SABR+2CDNC+2
For his presence in Harlan semipro ball, the obituary of coal operator Earl Jameson in the Harlan Daily Enterprise, reprinted in the Lee County, Kentucky, USGenNet obituary collection, explicitly describes Jameson as a former professional ballplayer who played with “Nobe Ballou and Earl Combs” in Harlan.USGenNet
Contextual material on Mount Morgan and Whitley County coal includes the Kentucky mining accidents index entries for “MOUNT MORGAN COAL,” the national directory “Coal mining companies and operators of the United States,” which lists Mount Morgan Coal Company of Williamsburg among Whitley County operators, the Historic Williamsburg roadside marker that names Mount Morgan Coal alongside other local companies, USGS derived descriptions of Mount Morgan as a summit on the Williamsburg quadrangle, and 1920 census transcriptions for Whitley County enumeration district 278 that show Ballou households on Mount Morgan Road.USGW Archives+4miningquiz.com+4Wikimedia Commons+4