In late summer 1973, as the Triple-A Pawtucket Red Sox were preparing for the playoffs, the team’s championship hopes received an unexpected boost when two hot-hitting outfielders from Double-A Bristol were added to the roster.
One was Jim Rice, the other Fred Lynn.
Tom Maggard, meanwhile, was headed in a different direction.
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Though all three players were highly regarded Red Sox prospects with dreams of playing in the big leagues, Maggard, a strapping 6-foot-6, 230-pound catcher selected 20th by Boston in the 1968 amateur draft, had been hampered throughout that ’73 season by a back injury that limited him to 47 games. He was hitting just .179 in 134 at-bats and hadn’t been in the lineup since July. And now there was this new medical issue: Maggard began to experience swelling in one of his arms, which the team determined was the result of an insect bite.
He had been sleeping on the floor in recent weeks, the hard surface taking some of the pressure off his aching back. It would later be theorized he was bitten by something crawling around on the floor. We’ll never know.
What is known is the Red Sox decided to send Maggard home for the remainder of the season since he wouldn’t be playing anyway. The Sox wanted him to rest up and get his back and arm looked at, the hope being he’d be as good as new come spring training.
As Maggard lived clear across the country in Norwalk, Calif., and what with his back and arm bothering him, it made sense, then, to put him on a plane, thus avoiding a long, uncomfortable drive to the West Coast. That would mean his wife, Debora, who had lived with her husband that season in an apartment in Cranston, R.I., would need to pilot their car back to Norwalk. They were coming up on their first wedding anniversary. Maggard’s mother, Shirley, hopped on a plane to Providence so she could keep Debora company during the long trip back to Norwalk.
Shirley and Debora made several calls home along the way, providing updates on where they were in the journey and to check on how Tom was doing. Tom’s father, Jack Maggard, would tell them everything was fine. Tom was resting, he’d say. Drive carefully. We’ll see you soon.
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But something about Jack’s voice didn’t sound right during the last couple of calls. Shirley sensed something was wrong. Debora did, as well.
What Jack had not told them was that Tom was dead, that two days earlier, on Sept. 9, he had lapsed into unconsciousness and been rushed to nearby Norwalk Community Hospital. It was determined he died of a staph infection.
That’s when Jack made an agonizing decision: Fearing what might happen if this terrible news was delivered to Shirley and Debora as they stood at a pay phone at some roadside diner, he would wait for the car to pull into the driveway.
When Shirley and Debora arrived at the Maggards’ trim, one-story home on Volunteer Avenue in Norwalk, Jack came out the front door.
So, too, did Tom’s brothers, Mike and Norm.
Debora immediately noticed that her identical twin sister, Deanna, was there, as was their mother.
Funny, interesting, rambunctious
The death of Tom Maggard is an overlooked, unexplored chapter in Red Sox history. Most minor-league players, even top prospects, were little known in the days before the internet and all-sports radio and television, and before an ambitious periodical called “Baseball America” came along in 1981 and shined a light over the years on farm teams from Old Orchard Beach to Walla Walla.
And so when Maggard’s passing was announced Sept. 11, 1973, it received only scant attention in the local papers. Red Sox general manager Dick O’Connell told The Boston Globe’s Peter Gammons, “Apparently, there was some type of serious allergy involved, because his arm swelled up and he had to have shots twice daily.”
In the world of baseball, life went on. The Red Sox finished their season, landing in second place in the American League East, eight games behind Baltimore. As for the Pawtucket Red Sox, they went on to win the International League championship and then defeated the American Association’s Tulsa Oilers in what was called the Junior World Series. Rice hit a three-run homer off right-hander Ike Brookens in the Game 5 clincher.
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And the Maggard family?
Debora Maggard — now Debora Dokter, long since remarried — told me she contemplated suicide until finding God.
Mike Maggard, Tom’s older brother by four years, said, “I remember thinking at the time, it was so sad for my dad because he had to kind of lie to (Shirley and Debora), although my mother told me later on she knew something was wrong. He tried to put on a, oh, everything’s fine, he’s here with us, and so on. It was very tough for him to do.”
Debora doesn’t remember what Jack told them in the driveway.
“The instant they walked out the door, I knew,” she said. “I saw my sister and I knew from her facial expression. That’s all I remember, them coming out the door as we walked up the driveway, and me looking into my sister’s eyes.”
And yet when I first reached out to members of the Maggard family, it was their hope that I’d write as much about Tom’s life as his death. They wanted him to be celebrated as a young man who was funny, interesting and rambunctious, and though he may have been big and brawny, he had a tender side when it came to sticking up for the underdog.
He was rather dashing, apparently. Bob Ryan, who in 1971 was a 25-year-old Globe sportswriter, made a July road trip with the PawSox and described Maggard as a “non-mustachioed Clark Gable on stilts.”
But more than all that, said Tom’s younger brother, Norm, “He was such a nice guy, and I think that’s what people should know.”
“I think Red Sox fans would have really liked him,” Mike said. “He had that way about him. He would have been popular. And he loved being with the Red Sox. I went to visit him in spring training one year, back when the Red Sox were in Winter Haven, and he told me he had been playing cards with Carl Yastrzemski in the clubhouse. He was so excited.”
How, then, to celebrate the life of Tom Maggard? Let’s begin here: People who knew him will tell you how much he loved roughhousing.
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That’s their word. Roughhousing.
“We lived in the same apartment complex and we’d always go to the park together, and we’d end up wrestling,” said former Red Sox shortstop Rick Burleson, who was Pawtucket teammates with Maggard in 1972 and ’73. “But he was big. And I always ended up on the floor. Of course, I had no chance against him, me being a 160-pound shortstop. He was just roughhousing, having fun. That was his nature.”
Mike Maggard could tell you a thing or two about that.
“We were throwing each other around in the bedroom this one time when we were kids, and his head went right through the wall,” Mike said. “And then there was the time we were playing ping-pong in the garage, and somehow or other he reached for the ball and fell on the table and it completely collapsed. Nothing real serious. He was like a bull in a china shop, always roughhousing.”
And yet for a kid possessing his size and athletic skills, with college baseball, basketball and football programs showing interest in him by the time he was a senior at John Glenn High, there was a sense of fairness about him that commanded as much respect as did his brute strength.
Paul Ellis, who in the fall of 1967 was a junior at John Glenn, remembers being invited by Maggard to join him at Senior Square, an informal gathering place for the school’s big men on campus.
“He said, ‘Come on, come on,’ and I said, ‘Tom, I can’t go in there, I’ll get beat up, that’s for seniors,’” Ellis said. “He grabbed me by the collar and said, ‘Let’s go.’ Some football player bumped into me, and Tom said, ‘Hey, hey, hey, he’s with me,’ and that’s all it took.”
Maggard limited his athletic pursuits to baseball and basketball his first three years at John Glenn. But he decided to give football a whirl his senior year — “Much to the chagrin of the basketball and baseball coaches,” Mike said — and he emerged as a defensive end and tight end, quickly getting attention from college programs.
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“He had offers in all three sports,” said Mike, who believes Michigan coach Bo Schembechler was interested in him as a tight end.
There was some talk he’d play basketball for John Wooden at UCLA. He wouldn’t have been the first member of his family to become a Bruin: An uncle, Ray Maggard, was a UCLA track and field star who in 1947 was NCAA pole vaulting champion.
Instead, it looked for a while like he’d continue another family tradition by following in the footsteps of big brother Mike, who was finishing up his basketball career at USC. (He was teammates with Bill Hewitt, a former star at Rindge Technical School in Cambridge, Mass., who later played six seasons in the NBA.) Tom committed to USC to play basketball, the hope being he’d also be able to play baseball for the legendary Rod Dedeaux.
But by spring 1968, it was the pro baseball scouts who were showing up in Norwalk. Included in the mix was Joe Stephenson, a much-respected West Coast talent evaluator for the Red Sox whose son, Jerry, was already pitching for the Sox. Tom had begun the season in center field — he had some wheels for a kid his size, apparently — but he moved behind the plate when the Eagles’ regular catcher went out with an injury. And that’s what the Red Sox saw in Tom Maggard. They saw a future big-league catcher with pop.
“I was sitting right behind a couple of Red Sox scouts during Tom’s first playoff game,” said Norm, a sophomore at John Glenn that spring. “He hit a long home run his first at-bat. I think they left before the game was over. They had seen enough.”
Stephenson pressed the Red Sox to select Maggard in the first round of the 1968 amateur draft. And the Sox did just that — with the 20th pick — after which Stephenson told reporters, “In all my years in baseball, I have never seen anyone, including major leaguers, hit a ball as far as this boy.”
But then things hit a snag: Not long after Maggard was drafted by the Red Sox, he injured an ankle while practicing to play in an upcoming high school basketball showcase. Though it wasn’t a “broken” ankle, as some newspaper reports stated, such was the concern by the Red Sox that they held off on making an offer until they could get a closer look at the kid.
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As it happened, the Red Sox were scheduled to begin a three-game series against the Angels on Friday, Sept. 7, at Anaheim Stadium, some 15 miles from Norwalk. Maggard was invited to suit up and work out with the team, with Red Sox scouting director Neil Mahoney flying to California to watch for himself before making any decisions.
The stakes were high. If the Sox signed Maggard and he turned out to be damaged goods, it would be a wasted first-round pick. If they didn’t sign him, Maggard would become a free agent, able to sign with another big-league team.
And then Maggard stepped up to the plate and began hitting shots all over the Big A. With Red Sox coach Bobby Doerr doing the pitching, Maggard hit two offerings “better than 400 feet” over the fence in left-center, according to various newspaper reports.
“The kid has not yet been signed, but he was very impressive in Friday’s batting drills,” reported the Boston Herald Traveler.
The Sox worked Maggard out again Saturday, after which they put a contract in front of him.
“Red Sox Sign Top Draft Pick” was the headline in the next day’s Boston Record American. Maggard reportedly signed for $50,000; according to his brother Mike, some of that money was promptly invested in a shiny new Dodge van.
Over the next four seasons, Maggard made a systematic rise through the Boston farm system — low Single-A Winter Haven in 1969 and then high-A Winston-Salem in 1970, followed by two seasons in Pawtucket when the PawSox were still playing at the Double-A level — but his numbers were inconsistent. He hit only .239 during those four seasons.
But he socked 17 home runs in 269 at-bats with the PawSox in 1971, and in 1972 he hit 14 home runs in 371 at-bats. While it’s unclear how much attention the Red Sox were paying to on-base percentage in those pre-Moneyball days, let the record show that Maggard’s OBP in ’72 was .371 in 446 plate appearances.
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Maggard missed time because of injuries and military service — he did basic training at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California — but it appears the Red Sox never stopped being bullish on the one-time bull in a china shop. And there was certainly historical precedence for this. Future Hall of Fame catcher Carlton Fisk, who emerged as American League Rookie of the Year in 1972, had spent most of the previous five seasons in the minors, save for a couple of cups of coffee in the bigs. Bob Montgomery spent nearly 10 full seasons bouncing around the Boston farm system before he finally got a September call-up in 1970. He went on to have a distinguished 10-year big-league career, serving mostly as Fisk’s backup.
And then there was Russ Gibson, who on April 14, 1967, was three weeks shy of his 28th birthday when he made his major-league debut, catching rookie lefty Billy Rohr’s one-hitter at Yankee Stadium. Like Montgomery, Gibson had spent 10 seasons in the minors.
The Pawtucket Red Sox were reclassified as Boston’s Triple-A club in 1973, meaning every player on the roster was one step away from the big leagues. Maggard was among them. Debora drove from California to Rhode Island, and they moved into the Cranston apartment.
But then Maggard’s back began to bother him. And then his arm swelled up.
And then the Red Sox sent him home.
“Tom had a good throwing arm, had a ton of power,” Burleson told me during a recent appearance at Fenway Park. “He had all the ability to make it. It’s a shame because I think he would have been a big leaguer. He might have been a real good one.”
A week later, I visited the NESN set at Fenway as Hall of Fame outfielder Jim Rice was getting ready to do the Red Sox pregame show with Tom Caron and former Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon.
“You mean Maggs? Let me tell you, Maggs could hit,” said Rice, who knew Maggard from their days in spring training.
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“They had high hopes for him. Super guy. He was a power-hitting catcher. They wanted that. He could hit the ball a mile.
“But then he went home,” Rice said. “And it was like he faded away from us. Sad story.”
‘Never really got over it’
After Tom’s death, Debora moved to Kingman, Ariz., to live with her mother. She met Wesley Dokter, whom she describes as a “wonderful, Godly man,” at church. They were married in 1975. They have a son, Derek, who is 42.
“I think God reached down and saved me, honestly,” she said. “And I got kind of saved by sympathy cards. I got hundreds of them. And when you’re distraught and you know that someone can reach down and give you the hope to want to live again, that’s what has carried me all these years. Trust me.”
Jack Maggard, who kept secret the news of Tom’s death until his wife and daughter-in-law pulled into the driveway on that heartbreaking September afternoon in 1973, died in 2011. He was 93. Shirley Maggard died in 2016, also at 93. They were interred with their son at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, Calif.
“I know my mother probably never really got over it,” Mike said. “My dad, he probably swallowed a lot of stuff. But it wasn’t like we had an unhappy life after that. I had my brother Norm, and we both had families of our own. We went on.”
Mike followed up his USC basketball career by playing for the “New York Nationals,” an outfit whose mission was to be foils for the Harlem Globetrotters. He toured with the Globetrotters for about a year, in the United States and Europe, after which he returned home and for 30 years was a teacher and coach at San Jacinto High. He’s now 77 and retired.
Norm Maggard, 71, played basketball at Cal State Fullerton and then began a long career as a Newport Beach firefighter. He has held onto one of his brother’s Red Sox jerseys, which is framed and on display in his home office, offset by a pair of photos of Tom. He also has a commemorative Tom Maggard Louisville Slugger bat affixed to the wall.
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The 50th anniversary of Tom’s death didn’t bring about any special memories, Norm said.
“That’s because I think about him every day.”
(Top photo courtesy of the Worcester Red Sox)
