The Jordans, father and son, were NM baseball royalty
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They should have walked him.
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When 12-year-old Tommy Jordan stepped to the plate to face Delaware Township, New Jersey, left-hander Roy Hayman, Jordan’s Roswell, New Mexico Lions Hondo All-Stars trailed 1-0 in the fourth inning of the 1956 Little League World Series championship game.
Hayman had struck out Roswell’s first two batters in the inning, meaning Delaware Township was just seven outs from victory. But Hayman, who had yet to give up a hit but was having control issues, then walked David Sherrod and Dick Storey.
Almost 70 years later, Jordan, 82, interviewed by phone from his home in Roswell, recalled that he expected Delaware Township manager Ray Strohmeier to have him walked intentionally.
Jordan, after all, had homered in each of Roswell’s two previous victories in Willamsport, Pennsylvania, lifting the upstart New Mexicans to the title game. And he hit right-handed.
In addition, though it’s likely neither Strohmeier nor Haymon were aware, young Tommy had been prepared for this moment by a father who’d played in the major leagues, dominated in the minors and had a manager’s knowledge of the game.
“Ferrell (Dunham) was up next,” Jordan said in a phone interview from his home in Roswell, reliving the big moment, “and he was left-handed (though Dunham pitched right-handed, and extremely well).”
As the son of a catcher, no one had to tell Tommy that a lefty-on-lefty matchup would have been more favorable for Delaware Township — even though Dunham was the closest to Jordan’s equal as a hitter on the Roswell roster.
For Strohmeier and Delaware Township, it was definitely a pick-your-poison situation.
Dunham, interviewed by phone from his home in Amarillo, Texas, confirmed that he was that relatively rare “B-L, T-R” (bats left, throws right) player. But he didn’t recall that Hayman was left-handed and had no idea what Jordan, or Strohmeier, was thinking at the time.
Strohmeier chose to have Hayman pitch to Jordan.
“Yeah, he probably did (regret it),” Jordan said.
Young Jordan sent a Hayman pitch high over the right-field fence, giving Roswell a 3-1 lead it never relinquished — thanks to Jordan the pitcher. After giving up a second-inning single and solo home run to Delaware Township’s Henry Singleton in the third, young Tommy finished his two-hitter with 14 strikeouts. He struck out the side in the sixth and final inning.
“I was pretty happy,” Jordan understated.
Happy barely begins to describe the reaction of the Roswell townsfolk, who turned out in huge numbers to greet their champions when the team arrived home two days later.
“When I saw the size of the crowd I realized what we had done,” Dunham said, as quoted by Roswell native Dewey Johnson in his recently published book, “That’ll Be the Day — a Story of the 10th Little League World Series.”
The 70th anniversary of the Lions Hondo All-Stars’ victory will be celebrated this coming weekend in Roswell.
The gene pool, plus
Jordan came by both his baseball talent and his baseball acumen honestly.
Tom Jordan Sr. was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, but called Roswell home for most of his adult life. Fresh out of high school, according to a lengthy obituary found online, he signed at age 18 in 1937 with the Abbeville (Louisiana) A’s of the Evangeline League.
The elder Jordan’s minor-league career took him to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Tom Jr. was born. After Shreveport sold his contract to the Chicago White Sox, he made his major-league debut on Sept. 4, 1944.
But his father, Tom Jr. said, didn’t enjoy life in the majors. He didn’t play at all in 1945, and after just 96 official at-bats, he left the majors behind in 1948.
“My dad always had (cotton and cattle) farms here (in Roswell),” Tom Jr. said. “He didn’t care much for the majors. He had the farms that (he and his wife, Lorene) had bought and they were a lot more lucrative than playing in the big leagues then.
“I think he was only making $6,000 a year in the big leagues.”
It was while playing in the minor leagues, closer to home and eventually becoming a player-manager, that Jordan Sr. truly prospered in the game.
With his hometown Roswell Rockets of the now long-defunct Class C Longhorn League, he hit 44 home runs in 1950. He hit .407 in 136 games with the Clovis Numexers of the Class C West Texas-New Mexico League in 1955.
During the 1953 and 1954 seasons, the elder Jordan was player-manager of the Albuquerque Dukes. He guided the Dukes to the WT-NM pennant in ’53.
Those were formative years for young Tommy, who, when not serving as the Dukes’ batboy, was playing Little League ball — often against older kids — in Albuquerque.
Johnson, author of the aforementioned book “That’ll Be the Day,” said he’d been told that Tom Sr. sometimes let the pre-adolescent Tom Jr. take batting practice against minor-league pitchers.
Thus, it came as no surprise that, during the 1956 Little League regular season in the Roswell Hondo Little League, 12-year-old Tommy was an absolute terror — at the plate and on the mound.
Once that year, Tom Sr. — at the time playing for the Carlsbad Potashers of the Class B Southwestern League — drove home to watch his son play for Roswell Hondo’s Stray Bolts.
“(The opposing team) walked me intentionally every time I came up,” Tom Jr. recalled. “My dad was really mad.”
Young Jordan got the same treatment, he said, when Stray Bolts faced Dunham’s Malco squad. Malco’s manager, he recalled, ordered Dunham to walk Jordan each time he came to the plate.
But when Jordan pitched against Malco, he said, Dunham hit a solo home run off him to beat Stray Bolts 1-0.
Dunham’s manager with Malco was Dick St. John, who would become the 1956 All-Stars’ manager. Dunham confirmed that he was instructed to walk his friend Tommy every time he came to the plate.
“(Opposing teams) didn’t pitch much to me, either,” Dunham said.
Dunham said he didn’t recall hitting a home run off Jordan, but, laughing, said, “If Tommy said it, I’ll go with it.”
Dunham and Jordan were by no means the whole show for the Roswell Hondo All-Star team.
At the Little League regional tournament in San Antonio, Texas, catcher Blaine Stribling hit two home runs and had five RBIs as Roswell beat Beaumont, Texas, 7-3. Third baseman David Sherrod, who earlier had tearfully asked manager St. John to be taken out of the lineup because he wasn’t hitting, clouted the go-ahead home run in a 3-1, extra-inning victory over Houston that punched Roswell’s ticket to Williamsport.
Even so, it was Jordan and Dunham who were the best hitters on the team and who pitched every single game, without relief from each other or anyone else.
The crowning achievement
Roswell came from behind in all three games in Williamsport.
In the opening game against Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, Jordan gave up a second-inning solo home run. But Sherrod tied it with a solo home run in the fifth, followed by back-to-back solo shots from Jordan and Dunham.
Roswell advanced with a 3-1 victory. Jordan finished with a two-hitter, striking out 13 and walking none. His control, it was said and written, was remarkable.
In the semifinal against Winchester, Massachusetts, Dunham gave up a two-run homer in the first inning. Jordan cut the deficit to 2-1 with a solo home run in the bottom of the first.
In the second, Roswell manufactured a tying run on a Sherrod single, two wild pitches and a Winchester error.
Winchester went back up 3-2 in the third, but Roswell struck for four runs in the fourth on singles by Harold Hobson and Jimmy Valdez, a double by Dave Smith and a single by Jordan, with two Winchester errors greasing the skids.
Roswell 6, Winchester 3. Dunham’s pitching stats: three runs, five hits, nine strikeouts.
Then came Jordan’s heroics against Delaware Township and joy in Williamsport — and back home in Roswell.
And then …
The consensus in Roswell was that the 1957 Roswell Hondo All-Stars — anchored by ’56 team members Dick Storey, Randy Willis and Mike Sandry — were actually better, throughout the roster, than the ’56 team had been. What the ’57 team didn’t have was Tommy Jordan or Ferrell Dunham. The 1957 team lost to Tucumcari, 8-2, in the New Mexico state tournament.
Not all 12-year-olds who are good at baseball are still that good, or even that interested, at 16. When the Roswell High School Coyotes won a state baseball title in 1960, only three or four members of the 1956 LLWS championship team — Jordan, Dunham and Stribling and possibly Storey, who would have been a ninth-grader in 1960 — were on the roster.
After high school, Jordan signed with the Chicago White Sox and played three years in their farm system before enlisting in the military.
Jordan played baseball in Germany — “Real high-level baseball,” he said. “It was Division Level One baseball. Your division had like 20,000 men in it.”
After his discharge from the service in 1966, Jordan drove a truck and farmed for a living. At 82, he’s one of two 1956 All-Stars, with Jimmy Vigil, who still live in Roswell.
Father and son
Dunham and Jordan Jr., lifelong friends, still see each other frequently. Dunham remembers spending lots of time as a kid with Tommy and his dad.
“We (he and Tommy) used to cut his hay in the summertime, and then go to ball practice,” Dunham said. “I spent half my days at Tommy’s house.”
Tom Jordan Sr. died in Roswell on Aug. 26, 2019, 10 days short of his 100th birthday. In the days before his death, he’d been the oldest living former major leaguer.
“He was really proud of that,” Tom Jr. said.
Jordan Sr. was no less proud of Tom Jr. He told author Gaylon White for White’s book, “Left on Base in the Bush Leagues,” that his son’s performance in 1956 was “his number one thrill in baseball.”
The feeling was mutual.
“My favorite player back then, and still today,” Jordan Jr. told the Journal’s Taylor Hood in 2016, upon the occasion of the 60th anniversary, “is my dad.”
More on the 1956 Roswell Little League World Series champions
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Roswell to celebrate 70th anniversary of New Mexico's only Little League World Series title