From the Bootheel to the Big League

Thursday, June 15, 2017
Former Gideon High School star Mark Littell delivers the heat as a reliever for the Cardinals. Littell returned to Southeast Missouri on June 2 when he gave a pitching fundamentals clinic at the Jackson High School baseball field. On June 3, he signed autographs at the SEMO Summer Sports Card Show at the Miner Convention Center. For more information, call 573-429-5804. You can contact Mark or order his book at www.marklittell.com. -photo courtesy of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Mark Littell shakes his head in wonderment at the many twists and turns his life has taken. A former major-league pitcher for the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals, his life is a baseball trivia quiz where all the answers are Mark Littell.

“After you finish reading my book, maybe you will understand a little about me because I’m not sure I do,” Mark says of his recently released book, “On the Eighth Day God Made Baseball.”

“Everybody says this about me: If there’s really a Forrest Gump, it’s me. I’m serious, because of all these interesting little things that happened to this country kid who came from nowhere.”

As an 11-year-old boy with a broken foot, Mark was riding the elevator up to his seat at the Cards’ old Sportsman’s Park when Lou Brock stepped on the elevator in his first home game with the Cardinals. Years later, Mark would be the winning pitcher when the Cardinal base stealer got his 3,000th hit.

He gave up the record-breaking hit when Pete Rose broke the National League all-time hitting record. Mark was the winning pitcher in both halves of a doubleheader and he also once lost three games in less than 24 hours. He gave up the game-winning home run that dropped the Royals from a World Series appearance in 1976 and once knocked out an umpire — and an elderly lady — with an errant pitch.

You can add to all this the fact that this small-town Missouri man played his entire career — nine seasons — with Missouri’s two Major League Baseball teams. He was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2016.

Mark still can remember his first at-bat in a baseball game. He grew up on a farm near Wardell, which also produced two other professional baseball players, Jeff and Jerome Stone. His dad drove him 13 miles to Gideon where he convinced Bo Wingo, the town marshall and baseball coach, to let the 6-year-old take a few swings. “I had never seen a baseball field before,” Mark recalls.

He tells the tale of his first hit in his book under a chapter called “Batter Up.” A right-handed pitcher, Mark learned on that day that he was a natural left-handed batter. He started out on the left side of the plate, took a pitch, then asked the umpire if he could move to the right side. He got the OK, but left his hands in the same position.

Mark took another pitch, decided he liked the left side better and again asked to switch sides. “I heard everyone laughing in the stands,” he says. “I said to myself, ‘I guess I better swing.’ So I saw the ball and I swung and it made contact. I’m glad I ran to first instead of third.”

Over the years, that swampy, mosquito-infested field in Gideon became Mark’s second home as he worked to achieve his dream of playing professional baseball. “I always said in my mind that I wanted to be a Major League Baseball player,” says Mark, who now lives in Phoenix. “I told my counselor that ever since I was a ninth grader. She said, ‘What do you really want to do?’ and I said, ‘I just told you.’ I told her that through my senior year.”

Many budding baseball players learn the game by playing catch with their dads. That didn’t work for Mark, whose father was shot in the wrist during the Korean conflict. Instead, Mark turned to his younger brother, Eric, who would catch him all through high school.

“I used to throw clods at him if he wouldn’t catch me,” Mark said of his brother, who also was drafted but instead opted for college at Mississippi State.

Mark says playing American Legion ball — first for Poplar Bluff and later for a team out of Blytheville, Arkansas — got him noticed by major league scouts. “You are playing a little better brand of baseball than high school,” Mark says. “You are getting noticed there. Every stone is pretty much turned over.”

Mark threw three no-hitters as a senior at Gideon High School. When his classmates were on their senior trip in 1971, Mark stayed home to pitch a couple of games for the Blytheville Casons. In one game he struck out 24 batters. That led to him being drafted in the 12th round and a professional contract with the Royals, signed when he was 18. His contract gave him just $4,250, with potential bonuses that could increase that up to another $5,000.

After just two years in the minor leagues, Mark was called up to the big leagues in 1973 after winning nine games in Triple-A ball by June 9. Only 20 years old and the youngest player at the time, he wasn’t really ready for the big time. But due to his success, the Royals were faced with either playing him or losing him to another team. His major-league debut came against Baltimore, with Mark going 6.1 innings and giving up just one hit.

He would play with the Royals until 1977, finding his spot as a relief pitcher. But the Royals decided they needed another left-handed reliever on the roster. They traded Mark and his wicked slider to the St. Louis Cardinals in a controversial exchange for Al Hrobowsky.

He would stay five seasons with the Cardinals, earning a World Series ring in 1982. He still holds the Cardinals’ record for most strikeouts in a season by a relief pitcher, 130.

For three seasons, he would pitch in more than 100 innings, an amazing stat for a reliever. “You wouldn’t do that nowadays,” Mark says.

His pitching career over, Mark turned to coaching, which he has done for 20 years, taking his skills as far away as Australia. At age 64, Mark isn’t close to slowing down. This year he will be the director of a winter league in Cuba, leading 60 U.S. ballplayers and 12 coaches to play against Cuban prospects.

During his career, Mark has had to explain to many sportswriters where the Bootheel is. He called it “that part Arkansas didn’t want.” He’s still amazed at his good fortune in being able to be part of the game he loves for so many years.

“I was lucky,” Mark relates. “But I always tell my players, ‘You know what luck is? It’s the residue of hard work.’ It kind of rubs off sometimes, that hard work that you do.”

(Reprinted with permission from The Rural Missourian.)

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