At Tigers spring training in 1971, Joe Coleman had the look of a pitcher whose career was on the upswing. Traded by the Senators, Coleman was with a contender for the first time. At 24, the right-hander with a potent fastball and forkball seemed on the cusp of becoming an ace.
Then, a Ted Simmons line drive nearly shattered Coleman’s outlook. Simmons’ scorcher struck Coleman above the right ear, fracturing his skull.
Hardheaded, in more ways than one, Coleman insisted on pitching again as quickly as possible. He returned to the starting rotation in mid-April and won 20 games for the 1971 Tigers.
Nearly 20 years later, in 1990, Coleman and Simmons were part of the same management team. Simmons was the Cardinals’ director of player development and Coleman became the club’s pitching coach.
Part of a three-generation family of big-league pitchers, Joseph Howard Coleman had a 142-135 record in 15 seasons (1965-79) with the Senators, Tigers, Cubs, Athletics, Blue Jays, Giants and Pirates before becoming a coach for the Angels and then the Cardinals.
His father, Joseph Patrick Coleman, was 52-76 in 10 seasons (1942, 1946-51, 1953-55) with the Athletics, Orioles and Tigers.
Joseph Casey Coleman, son of Joseph Howard and grandson of Joseph Patrick, was 8-13 in four seasons (2010-12 and 2014) with the Cubs and Royals.
Teen dream
The first of the Coleman pitchers, Joseph Patrick, attended Malden (Massachusetts) Catholic High School near Boston in the late 1930s. The principal, Brother Gilbert, was a friend of Babe Ruth. During a visit to the school, Ruth took Coleman into a hallway and used an eraser as a ball to show the teen pitcher how to throw a curve, according to Russ White of the Washington Daily News.
When Coleman’s son, Joseph Howard, attended Natick (Massachusetts) High School in the early 1960s, he became a prized pitcher because of his fastball. He spent summers at the Ted Williams boys camp. “Ted taught me more about hitting than anything,” Coleman recalled to the Washington Daily News. “He always wanted to make me a switch-hitter.”
Coleman didn’t become much of a hitter, but his pitching was a different story. In three varsity high school seasons, he was 21-4 and achieved three no-hitters, according to the Boston Globe.
On the recommendation of farm director Hal Keller, the Senators chose Coleman, 18, with the third overall pick in the first round of the June 1965 amateur draft.
To convince Coleman to sign with the Senators instead of opting for college, general manager George Selkirk offered him $75,000 and promised the teen a start in a big-league game that year, the Washington Daily News reported.
Sent to a farm club in Burlington, N.C., Coleman didn’t seem ready for the minors, posting a 2-10 record, let alone the big leagues, but Selkirk delivered on his promise. Called up to the Senators in September 1965, Coleman, 18, was matched against Catfish Hunter, 19, in a start against the Athletics at Washington.
“He’s the youngest looking 18-year-old I’ve ever seen,” Senators manager Gil Hodges told the Washington Daily News. “I doubt if he even shaves yet.”
Among the fewer than 2,000 spectators at the twi-night doubleheader opener were Coleman’s parents. “His father sat in the presidential box, nonchalantly blowing cigar smoke straight up into the sky,” the Washington Daily News noted.
“Old Joe’s as nervous as the kid,” George Selkirk told the newspaper. “Those are his butterflies blowing that smoke out.”
While his father blew smoke, young Joe threw it. Three months after graduating high school, he pitched a four-hitter for a 6-1 victory in his big-league debut. Of Coleman’s 136 pitches, 100 were fastballs.
“I was shaking when I went to the mound,” Coleman told the Boston Globe. “I was still shaking nine innings later. I never did calm down.” Boxscore
The Senators gave him another start, in the last game of the season, and Coleman responded with a five-hitter in a 3-2 win against the Tigers. Boxscore
Good, bad, ugly
Sent back to the minors in 1966, Coleman didn’t impress (7-19), but the Senators wanted to take a look at him in September. Given one start, in the final game of the season, Coleman pitched a six-hitter and beat the Red Sox before a gathering of 485 at Washington. Boxscore
Not even 20, Coleman had made three big-league starts and all three were complete-game wins.
A good pitcher on bad teams, Coleman won eight for the Senators in 1967 and 12 in 1968, the year he developed a forkball to compensate for his inability to throw an effective curve. (Maybe he should have tried learning with an eraser.)
In 1969, Coleman’s former summer camp instructor, Ted Williams, was Senators manager. Coleman again had 12 wins that year, but Williams was of the opinion Coleman would win more if he threw a slider. That led to a rift during the 1970 season. “He wanted me to throw the slider and I tried like a son of a gun to do it,” Coleman told the Detroit Free Press. “I hurt my arm doing it and he thought I was faking it. I didn’t appreciate that and we had a go-round about it.”
Coleman also said to the newspaper, “He wanted me to throw slider, slider and then spot my fastball … I couldn’t pitch that way.”
Coleman’s win total for 1970 fell to eight. At one point, Williams banished him to the bullpen and fined the pitcher for chewing gum on the mound.
The Tigers, who coveted Coleman (his career record against Detroit at that point was 8-0), took advantage of the turmoil in Washington, engineering a trade lopsided in their favor. On Oct. 9, 1970, the Tigers swapped Denny McLain, Elliott Maddox, Norm McRae and Don Wert for Coleman, Ed Brinkman, Aurelio Rodriguez and Jim Hannan.
Looking back on his Senators stint, Coleman told Jim Hawkins of the Detroit Free Press that some of the players “should have been out digging ditches” instead of playing and “we just didn’t have enough professionals on that club.” As for Ted Williams, Coleman said, “I just don’t think we played together as a team as much as we should have … That was Ted’s fault more than anyone else’s.”
True grit
On March 27, 1971, in a spring training game at St. Petersburg, Fla., the Cardinals’ Ted Simmons batted in the fourth inning against Coleman and lined the ball so hard that the pitcher couldn’t get out of the way. “I never saw the ball coming,” Coleman recalled to The Sporting News.
After being struck, Coleman toppled forward and landed with a thud. “It was a sickening sound,” Tigers catcher Bill Freehan told The Sporting News.
Coleman was carried off on a stretcher and sent to a hospital. Neurosurgeons said he had a linear fracture. “Four weeks and several headaches later,” Coleman was restored to the Tigers’ active roster, Curt Sylvester of the Free Press reported.
“I still have headaches, but the doctors say I’ll probably continue to have them until the fracture is completely healed,” Coleman told the newspaper. “The doctors told me that it would be a million-to-one that I’d get hit there again.”
On May 16, 1971, Coleman started against the Senators for the first time since the trade. Taking the mound, he “blatantly mocked his former manager (Ted Williams) by chewing a wad of bubble gum,” George Solomon of the Washington Daily News reported.
Coleman pitched a complete game for the win _ never once throwing a slider _ and the .106 career hitter also contributed two hits and a walk. Boxscore
Coleman went on to pitch 286 innings for the 1971 Tigers. He pitched 16 complete games and was 20-9 (including 3-0 versus the Senators).
On March 27, 1972, exactly one year after he suffered the skull fracture, Coleman was on the mound facing Ted Simmons and the Cardinals again at St. Petersburg. He pitched seven scoreless innings, overcoming any lingering psychological hurdle from the year before.
From 1971-73 with the Tigers, Coleman posted marks of 20-9, 19-14 and 23-15. For eight straight seasons (1968-75), he pitched more than 200 innings each year.
In his lone career playoff appearance, Game 3 of the 1972 American League Championship Series versus the Athletics, Coleman pitched a shutout and struck out 14. “I don’t think I have had a better forkball than I had today,” Coleman said to the Free Press. Boxscore and Video
Taking charge
After his playing days, Coleman coached and managed in the farm systems of the Mariners (1980-81) and Angels (1982-87). When Angels bullpen coach Bob Clear had back problems in 1987, Coleman filled in for him. After Clear retired, Coleman replaced him and was Angels bullpen coach from 1988-90.
Joe Torre was an Angels broadcaster during that time and he and Coleman became pals. “We got to know each other playing golf,” Torre told Dan O’Neill of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “We’d talk about last night’s game.”
Torre became Cardinals manager in August 1990. Two months later, he hired Coleman to be the St. Louis pitching coach. “I like the relationship he had with his pitchers and his day-to-day instruction,” Torre told the Post-Dispatch. “… Joe is very good with young pitchers.”
At his first Cardinals spring training in 1991, Coleman had pitchers work on ways to keep batters from getting comfortable at the plate. “I pitched aggressively and I coach aggressively,” Coleman told the Post-Dispatch. “… I feel aggressiveness is on a downward trend in pitching … When (my father) pitched, if someone hit a home run off you, the next guy up was diving … It’s become one-sided the other way … I just want these (pitchers) to feel that part of the plate is theirs.”
As columnist Bernie Miklasz noted, Coleman became “the busiest amateur psychologist in town” during the 1991 season. “He has elevated an average pitching staff, reaching their arms by getting inside their heads.”
Cardinals pitchers in 1991 gave up 648 runs, 50 fewer than the year before. The improvement continued in 1992, when the total number of runs they allowed dropped to 604. “Coleman coaxed dozens of good outings from youngsters Rheal Cormier, Donovan Osborne and Mark Clark after they were rushed into the rotation,” Jeff Gordon of the Post-Dispatch wrote in October 1992.
Ups and downs
The pitching staff in 1993, however, unraveled like an overused batting practice ball. Cardinals pitchers gave up 744 runs, 140 more than the year before. “At the start of the (1994) year, I told Coleman the pitching had to improve and that both our butts were on the line for that,” Joe Torre recalled to the Post-Dispatch.
Under pressure, Coleman took to ranting at pitchers. When that didn’t work, he gave them a three-page letter. “Some basic premises of the letter were for the pitchers to be more aggressive, as in pitching inside; to be team-oriented; and to not feel sorry for themselves,” Rick Hummel of the Post-Dispatch reported.
Nothing worked. Among National League teams, only the Rockies (638) gave up more runs than the Cardinals (621) in strike-shortened 1994.
In a plea for his job, Coleman wrote a letter to club president Mark Lamping: “I learned more about myself (as a coach) this year and what I’m capable of doing than I ever have. I got to the point where I tried to do some things that I can’t do. I tried to restructure people mechanically at the major-league level. You can’t do that … I was looking for a quick fix, and the quick fix wasn’t there. Unfortunately, I didn’t find that out until July. At the beginning of the year, I was coaching to keep my job.”
Under orders from Lamping, Torre fired Coleman. “I still feel Joe Coleman did a good job, but, sometimes, nobody listens to you,” Torre told the Post-Dispatch.
Coleman returned to the Angels and became a special assignment scout. When the Angels fired pitching coach Chuck Hernandez in August 1996, Coleman replaced him. He then remained on the Angels’ big-league staff as a bullpen coach from 1997 to 1999.
From 2000 to 2014, Coleman coached in the farm systems of the Rays, Tigers and Marlins. He spent 50 consecutive years (1965-2014) in pro baseball. Coleman was 78 when he died on July 9, 2025.
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