Editor’s Note — This is part tTwo of a two-part column covering the Lima minor league baseball team that played from the 1930s to the 1950s.
For Lefty Settlemire, the player-manager of the 1940 Class D defending Shaughnessy Playoff Lima Pandas, now owned by a Lima syndicate, a quicker start out of the gates than the previous year was the goal.
The Pandas in a 130-game season, played almost daily against teams in the Ohio State League. The lineup, especially up the middle, was predicted to be strong, with future Major Leaguer, Coldwater native Ralph Weigel, catching and the talented double-play combo at second and short, of Clair Crum and Bucky Kozak. And, every fourth day, that middle became even stronger when southpaw Frank “Porky” Biscan toed the rubber. Porky came to the Pandas early in the ’39 season and solidified the staff, pitching to a 12-3 record. He also hit for a .325 average.
Following an opening day 13-5 loss on a rain-sodden field in Mansfield to the hometown Braves, a game sadly for Lima punctuated by six errors, the Pandas had to wait through three more days of rain before the home opener at Halloran Park. The skies finally cleared enough for Lima mayor, Frank McClain, who threw out the ceremonial first pitch. Unfortunately, the Pandas’ misfortunes hadn’t cleared up along with the weather, as they again lost, this time in ten innings, 9-7, stranding fourteen runners in the process.
Just when Lefty Settlemire may have been muttering, “Here we go again,” remembering the putrid start to the 1939 season, Porky made his first start of the season and secured a 5-3 win, yielding just four hits and fanning ten Fremont Green Sox.
Hitting help also came early in the season when slugging left-handed first baseman Johnny Cindric was signed. Cindrac had played for the Ohio State League Findlay Oilers the previous season and posted huge numbers. He’d just completed his junior year at Findlay College. His was the big bat the Pandas needed to make some real noise.
A victory over the Redbirds of Fostoria the following day evened the record at 2-2 on a chilly May day on the road, a day described in less politically sensitive times in a Lima News game account thusly: “The 150 spectators present huddled in blankets like Indians.”
Then the Pandas started to roll, especially when Porky made his starts. With Cindric hammering two homers over the right-field fence at Halloran on Mother’s Day Eve and Biscan’s four-hitter, the Pandas won 12-1 over the Tiffin Mud Hens. Biscan pitched again the next day, this time in relief, and picked up his second win in two days, a 7-6 triumph over Fremont in ten innings.
After ten games, the Pandas were 7-3, and the wins continued to pile up. In the early phases of the season, for Porky Biscan, something wonderful also happened at Halloran that had the fans buzzing. Before a game he was scheduled to pitch, at a ceremony at home plate, Porky married a Lima young lady, 18-year-old Jane Pearson, and then put an exclamation mark on the festivities by going out and tossing his first of what would become six shutouts on the season, silencing the Tiffin Mud Hens’ bats.
Through June and July and August, the Pandas strung together several winning streaks and avoided sustained losing skeins, largely behind Biscan’s consistency and Cindric’s thunderous bat. The Pandas wrapped up the regular season 85-34, a phenomenal .714 winning percentage, capturing the pennant by 131/2 games over second-place Findlay. Biscan’s 26-4 record and 243 strikeouts were league bests and Cindric’s 39 homers set a league record to go along with his 150 RBI in just 119 games.
The Pandas were so good they placed seven players on the league all-star team, and in the eyes of many baseball historians, the 1940 Lima Pandas may very well have been the best Class D team ever assembled.
The Pandas were hungry, however, for more than just the regular-season crown as they rolled into the Shaughnessy Playoff Series. Behind Biscan, Lima broke out quickly against Mansfield, winning 7-4, for Porky’s eleventh straight win. Two more wins followed, making it a three-game sweep in the best-of-five format in the semifinal round. Player-manager Settlemire called on himself to secure the clincher.
In the best-of-seven finals versus Findlay, the Pandas suffered a rare loss in the opener, 6-4, which was an equally rare loss for Porky, only his fifth in 32 decisions. However, a couple of Bucky Kozak homeruns and another by his double-play partner Clair Crum powered the Pandas to a 9-2 win.
Lefty Settlemire again selected the right pitcher in Game 3, himself, as he beat the Oilers 6-4, aided greatly by outfielder Ted Hass’s two homeruns. Perhaps no player-manager on any level of organized baseball ever had a better season than Lefty, both from a team success standpoint and on a personal level. Settlemire’s win in Game 3 was his sixteenth straight without a loss.
Despite the fact that Porky had to be shut down for the rest of the series with a sore arm, “settling” for his 27-5 mark, the Pandas did indeed win the post-season championship as well in six games, with a 15-7 clinching win, aided greatly by Kozak’s five hits, including a homer. The trophy presentation took place right where Porky and Jane married earlier that season, at home plate.
There would be one more edition of Pandas, in 1941, but with most of the 1940 championship players gone, some into the military and some scattered in other directions, Lima crawled to the finish line just 43-64 and out of consideration for the Shaughnessy.
One of the players who had moved on after the duel-championship of 1940 was Porky Biscan, then 21 years old. As the league’s best pitcher in ’40, Biscan earned his opportunity to pitch several rungs up baseball’s ladder for the Class AA Toledo Mud Hens, an affiliate of the St. Louis Browns. However, before any of that could happen, tragedy came a calling, one so great that Biscan actually pondered quitting baseball.
As he toiled in the Mud Hens’ spring training camp in Harlington, Texas, Biscan was anticipating the birth of his first child, and he would return to Lima to be with Jane for the big event.
Upon returning, Biscan suffered the greatest of losses, two actually, when his 19-year-old wife and son both died in childbirth, the result of uremic poisoning.
It took a strong push from Mud Hen team officials to convince Porky to stay with baseball. With a heavy heart, Biscan did and pitched as a Toledo Mud Hen to a 9-7 mark, often sending Western Union telegrams announcing when he would pitch back to Lima and the woman to whom he wrote for years, the woman he simply called “Mother,” Jane’s mother, Bessie.
Biscan’s 1941 season earned him his first Major League spring training invitation in 1942 with the Browns of the American League, and he impressed manager Luke Sewell so much that he made the opening day roster. The 22-year-old’s debut was a strong one. In eleven games, all in relief, over 27 innings, Porky crafted a 2.33 ERA. His mound moments included three encounters with the Great DiMaggio and The Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams, with no hits surrendered.
However, as the winds of war hastened following the December 7, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor, Porky did what so many young men did and enlisted in the Navy. Over 500 Major League players and some 4,000 who were playing in the minors, including Porky’s former Panda catcher, Ralph Weigel, left their careers behind to join the armed forces. Biscan left the Browns in June.
Because of Porky’s talented left arm, upon his arrival at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, he was asked to join the Naval baseball team, the vaunted Blue Jackets, coached by future Cooperstown’s inductee, Mickey Cochrane, a squad that included thirteen Major and ex-Major Leaguers, including future Hall of Fame inductee Johnny “Big Cat” Mize, with the rest of the squad comprised almost entirely of minor leaguers. The Navy teams of the WWII years were so talented they often were called the Major League’s Seventeenth Team and frequently won exhibitions over Major League teams.
Biscan continue to write to “Mother,” Bessie, in one letter, issuing this heartfelt request: “Please keep flowers on Jane’s grave. You know how she loved them so.”
After four years playing baseball and also seeing action in the Pacific, Biscan left the Navy and played for two years back with the Browns in 1946 and ’47, going a combined 7-7, before being sent back down to the minors for the 1948 season. Having lost four of his prime years in service of his country, never again would Porky throw another Major League pitch.
With his baseball journey hardly over, Biscan’s travels resembled the lyrics of Johnny Cash’s song, “I’ve Been Everywhere.” From ’48 through 1955, Porky pitched for minor-league teams in San Antonio, Memphis, San Francisco and Nashville.
Finally, following fourteen years of professional baseball, interrupted by four years with the Navy, Porky stepped off the rubber for the final time before the 1956 season.
During his baseball travels, despite remarrying and fathering three children, he continued to write back to Bessie. Sadly, for Biscan, his post-baseball existence was brief. Just seventy days into his 39th year in 1959, he suffered a fatal heart attack and died in a St. Louis hospital, much to sadness of many, no doubt, including the retired Lefty Settlemire, who lived in the Indian Lake region for years after his Panda moments, and Jolting Johnny Cindric, who would become Superintendent Cindric of the Beaverdam Schools by the time of Porky’s death.
And, the vestiges of Porky Biscan’s life from that time on were encapsulated in a box, one first kept by Jane Pearson’s mother and then eventually passed along to Porky’s nephew, Spencerville’s Rick Wierwille, until, finally, they would become the research tools for giving you the intersecting narratives of one of the most accomplished Class D baseball teams of all time, the Lima Pandas, and a somewhat corpulent southpaw who was, from life’s first pitch to its final out, a true baseball man.
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