Ron LeFlore: From Prison to the Major Leagues

On May twenty third, nineteen seventy three, legendary baseball manager Billy Martin went to go scout a new prospect. But what made this different was where the prospect was. At Jackson State Prison, Ron the Floor was getting scouted by Billy Martin and would later make it all the way to the major leagues. Here's the story behind how all this happened today on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Reese, your guide to a rapid deep dive into sports history every day. And today's trivia question is who was the very first ex Cohn to make it to play professional baseball? So Ron the Floor is the name you may have heard of if you are a huge Tiger's fan back in the seventies, But other than that, the name he probably hadn't heard of very much as he was a good baseball player, But he actually made more of a name for himself because of how he made it to the majors. See. Growing up, Ron didn't have the best home life, being one of four boys. His father struggled to keep a job, and he took to the streets and started getting involved in drug dealing and even became a heroin addict, which would lead him to do some petty crimes, but worse came in nineteen seventy, armed with a shotgun, he robbed a bar for over thirty thousand dollars with a couple of friends. A few months later they would catch him and he would be arrested and charged with armed robbery and be sentenced to five to fifteen years in state prison, and he was sent to Jackson State Penitentiary. Now, because of his upbringing, Lafour actually didn't get involved in sports very much, and he actually said that he didn't touch a baseball until he got to prison. Now, having baseball in prison was something that went back to early nineteen hundreds, which started in Sing Sing Prison in New York in nineteen fourteen, where the wardens thought inmates participating in sports would help the performance of the prison, allowing them an outlet for maybe their frustration and anger and something to focus on instead of getting into fights and causing issues at the prison. So they took this idea and started a mutual welfare league for prisoners, and this actually became very popular and some of the top prison teams would play exhibition games against professional teams, including the Yankees with Babe Ruth and Luke Carrick once played a game with inmates and this got adopted over many different locations and is something that still continued in small part to this day, depending on the severity of the prison or they use other sports like baseball to help the inmates. But some of these leagues actually had some people that turned out to be great ball. Now, normally you play baseball when you're a young person, and if you're in prison, you're taking away the best years of your life to play baseball. Sometimes you're not there very long and you have a chance to get out and have success, and that's exactly what Ron the Floor did. But he wasn't the first ex KHN to make it to professional baseball. To get to the first one that was back in nineteen thirty five when Edwin Alabama Pitts was released from sing sing prison after serving six years for a robbery for armed robbery, and he actually participated in that Singh Singh prison program. The Alabama Senators of the International League, was a minor league team for the National League, wanted to offer a contract to Pitts, but this was originally rejected by the executive Committee of the Minor Leagues, but they made an appeal to Kinissau Mountain Landis, the commissioner of baseball at the time, who eventually overturned the committee's ruling and allowed him to play. Though he played for five years, he didn't actually make it to the majors, but it was a stepping stone and one that led to on the floor to possibly make it to the major While incarcerated at the Jackson State Prison in Michigan, he got involved in their baseball program, and he had two things going for him. He was somewhat young in a great athlete, standing at sixty two almost two hundred pounds, he could run faster than anyone else in the prison, and he actually had good eyes to make contact with the ball. Now, they don't really keep very good stats for these prison leagues, but it's reported that his first year playing in this league, he hit four sixty and the following year he hit five sixty. And this caught the attention of a fellow convict named Jimmy Beskarsky, who was a co owner of a bar in Detroit where his good friend Billy Martin also attended, and he got ahold of Billy through some back channels and told him about this great player in their prison league, and so Billy went to go check him out and he was able to talk to the parole board into giving him conditions to be released so he could sign with the Tigers, and he was given the league minimum fifteen thousand dollars paycheck. He was given five thousand dollars bonus after getting released in July, and he played for the Clinton Pilots Class A Midwest League managed by future World Series champion manager Jim Leland, and that first year he hit two seventy seven while playing in the outfield, and he continued to move up. The following year, he hit three hundred and thirty one while stealing forty seven bases in one hundred and two games while playing with the Lakeland Tigers in the Florida State League. Then he made it to Triple A for the Evansville Triplets, where he played nine games, and in nineteen seventy six, after an injury to their center fielder, Ron Lafloor was called up to the majors to play for the Detroit Tigers. Now by this time Billy Martin had been released as the manager, but Ron Lafloor. He was a good talent, so it didn't matter. In nineteen seventy seven, he hit sixteen homers and had a batting average of three to twenty five and showed that he belonged in the majors. But the problem was he was falling back into bad habits, getting involved with former colleagues as he was playing in Detroit where he grew up, and getting involved with people in the drug and gang scene in the area, actually bringing them into the clubhouse at times, and despite having a batting average of over three hundred while playing with the Tigers, after five years of playing for the Tigers, when he was voted an All Star, he was finally traded to the Montreal Expos because his name was being brought up in DEA investigations and the Tigers caught wind of this and they did not want to be involved. But with the Expos, he still had a strong season. He led the league in steals with ninety seven steals, and after this year he finally got a chance to hit free agency. He signed a contract with the Chicago White Sox for over a million dollars. This truly was a Rax to Riches story, and he even released a book with the title Breakout from Prison to the Big Leagues, which was a best seller. He was on top of the world in all start crashing down as his body was starting to break down because when the Tigers originally brought him into their system, they thought he was only twenty years old, but in fact he lied about his age and he was actually twenty five. So by this point he was in his mid thirties and his body was breaking down and he couldn't keep up with the everyday challenges of being a major league player. So he fizzled out while with the White Sox and couldn't get attached to another team, and in in nineteen eighty three, he officially announced his retirement. Now he would later be arrested on a drug and weapons charge, but the charges were later dropped as he was living with multiple people and they couldn't prove that the drugs were his or someone else's, but he did. But he did struggle to make his way after his playing career. He bounced around to different coaching positions and doing events where he signed autographs, but he couldn't make enough to make ends meat living off his baseball pension of about twenty thousand dollars a year, and he would continuously get arrested multiple times for failure to pay child support. And unfortunately, in twenty eleven, he had contracted an arterial vascular disease due to smoking cigarettes from when he was a teenager and they had to amputate his leg. So now he uses a prosthetic league and lives down in Florida with his wife, living paycheck to paycheck, only thinking about the glory days when he played baseball. And I think what we could really take away from this story from on the floor is don't take for granted what you're given. There's no reason he should have made the major leagues. He got lucky that he had a friend that knew somebody in the major leagues in prison. He got lucky that he was good at baseball and that they had a baseball team in prison, and he got the chance to live out his dream. And he did great for multiple years, but he didn't save. He fell back into a bad crowd and he would be later out of the league in just a few years, struggling to make in his meat. Times at good times don't last for ever, but don't cake for Greened when you have a good times and if you had a good time listening to this show, then share it with a friend wherever you're listening so they can become a sports historian just like you. Come back tomorrow for more daily sports history and the answer to today's trivia question, who was the first ex con to play professional baseball? It was Edwin Alabama Pitts in nineteen thirty five.