Cal Baseball: Jackie Jensen and the Bears Won the 1st College World Series 75 Years Ago
The College World Series begins Friday at Omaha, Nebraska, and whichever team wins isn’t likely to face a pair of future icons as Cal did at the first one 75 years ago.
Coach Clint Evans, whose enthusiasm for a national championship tournament led to the creation of the College World Series, directed the Bears to the inaugural title over Yale in the finals of the 1947 event.
Along the way, the Bears got the best of a future Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback and the man who would become the 41st president of the United States.
They beat Texas star pitcher Bobby Layne in the West regional final, then held first baseman George H.W. Bush to 0-for-7 at the plate in the Bears’ two-game sweep of Yale.
Clint Evans
Photo courtesy of Cal Athletics
The Bears were an experienced team, at least in terms of life experience. Many of their players had just returned from time spent in the military during World War II. Their best hitter was junior left fielder Jack Fiscalini, who was the California Intercollegiate Baseball Association batting champion with either a .362 or .414 average, depending on which three-quarter century-old source you believe.
Fiscalini earned All-America honors his final two seasons and is a member of the Cal Athletics Hall of Fame. He was 5 for 8 at the plate in the two games vs. Yale.
But the Bears also had a star in the making in 20-year-old Jackie Jensen. This was a year-and-a-half before he finished fourth in the Heisman Trophy voting as a fullback for coach Pappy Waldorf and 11 years before he was the 1958 American League MVP. Jensen was a raw freshman, not even an everyday player.
But he did his part in leading the Bears to four straight victories in the eight-team tournament to claim the first collegiate baseball national championship.
Jensen was the starting pitcher against Layne when the Bears and Longhorns met for the chance to advance to the two-team World Series.
Jensen became a star outfielder in the majors. He manned right field for the Red Sox in ’58, actually turning in a better season than Boston left fielder Ted Williams. Jensen hit 35 home runs and drove in an AL-best 122 runs to earn league MVP honors.
Jackie Jensen
Photo courtesy of Cal Athletics
As a Cal freshman, he was largely a pinch-hitter or a pitcher, whose repertoire included having the confidence he could throw fastballs on virtually every delivery.
"Some guys got on him, telling him he couldn't just fire it past guys in college," Cal outfielder Cliff McClain told the San Francisco Chronicle in a 1996 interview. "But as far as his fastball, you could tell he was special.”
He certainly got the attention of Yale’s players. "Physically, he was awesome," Yale third baseman Red Mathews said in an interview with the Chronicle. "He was strong and fast and big. I was very impressed with him.”
Before facing Yale, the Bears first had to get past Texas in the West playoff at Denver.
Layne took the mound for the Longhorns, 12-0 on the season and a year removed from pitching two no-hitters. A four-time All-Southwest Conference pitcher (and quarterback), Layne fashioned a 35-3 career record in college, striking out nearly 11 batters per nine innings.
Bobby Layne
Photo courtesy of Texas Athletics
His future was in the NFL, where he developed a reputation as a star who enjoyed life off the field but led the Detroit Lions to a pair of championships and retired as pro football’s career leader in almost every passing department.
As a college quarterback, Layne twice finished in the top-10 voting for the Heisman.
But on June 21, 1947, Cal handed him his only pitching defeat of the season. Neither starter delivered a star performance, but Cal won 8-7 to stay alive in the tournament.
That sent Cal to best-of-three finals at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
The College World Series was an idea hatched and promoted by Evans, the Bears’ coach. It was finally approved and implemented just months before the event in June.
''Clint was always talking about how, 'We've got to have a World Series for baseball,' '' center fielder Lyle Palmer, who batted 5 for 7 vs. Yale, told Baseball Weekly in 1996. ''My fondest memory (is that) he was the happiest man I ever saw in my life (when Cal won) and he never forgot it until the end of his life.’’
“There was a special feeling on the team,” McClain said in an interview with Cal in 1987 on the 40th anniversary of the championship. “We wanted to win it for Clint. He’d worked too hard to get the tournament established. There was a great sense of pride for him and ourselves in being the first to win it.”
George Bush is greeted by Babe Ruth in 1948
Photo courtesy of Yale Athletics
Awaiting the Bears were Yale and Bush, a smooth-fielding first baseman. The future president reportedly was popular but wasn’t much of a hitter, as his teammates would sometimes remind him.
"For chrissakes, Bush, get a damn hit,” Yale catcher Norm Felske supposedly would say to him.
Yale’s best player was pitcher Frank Quinn, who later made it to the major leagues, although his career consisted of 24 innings over nine games with the Red Sox.
The Bulldogs led 4-2 through six innings of Game 1 before Cal figured out the Yale ace. The Bears scored twice in the seventh to tie the score, twice more in the eighth to go in front before erupting for 11 runs in the ninth for a 17-4 victory.
Jensen started Game 2, and the Bears gave him an early 7-2 lead. He struck out four batters but walked six and was knocked out of the game when Yale put up four runs in the fifth. Cal scored an unearned run in the seventh and held on for an 8-7 clinching victory.
But it was a bit of strategy gone wrong by Yale coach Ethan Allen in the seventh inning of the first game turned the series.
"We walked the eighth hitter to get to the pitcher, and it was Jackie Jensen," Bush told Associated Press in 2007, alluding to the fact that Jensen had come on in relief as Cal's third pitcher. "He hit one that's still rolling out there in Kalamazoo.
Jensen's game-tying single opened the flood gates.
"We knew that Jensen played football at Cal," Felske, the catcher, told AP. "I don't think he was that well known as a baseball player. But after that series, we all sure knew him.”
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Game 1
NCAA
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Game 2
NCAA
Cover photo of Cal's 1947 national championship team courtesy of Cal Athletics
Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo