Background
He was born on March 24, 1893 in Manchester, Ohio, United States, the son of Cassius Sisler, manager of a coal mine, and Mary Whipple. Sisler spent his early years in Nimisila, ten miles south of Akron.
He was born on March 24, 1893 in Manchester, Ohio, United States, the son of Cassius Sisler, manager of a coal mine, and Mary Whipple. Sisler spent his early years in Nimisila, ten miles south of Akron.
He studied at Akron Central High School. At his father's urging, Sisler put aside professional baseball and entered the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1910. He graduated in 1915 with a degree in mechanical engineering.
At age seventeen, Sisler signed a contract, to take effect on his high school graduation, with Akron in the Ohio-Pennsylvania League. At Michigan, Sisler became the outstanding college baseball player in the country.
Sisler's first coach at Michigan was Branch Rickey, who became field manager to the St. Louis Browns of the American League in 1913. Rickey moved to void Sisler's contract with Akron, which had been transferred to the Pittsburgh Pirates. He argued that the young pitcher had signed the agreement while he was a minor and without his parents' consent. Eventually, the Major League National Commission ruled in Rickey's favor, and in 1915 Sisler signed with the Browns.
Sisler's first major league season was 1915. He appeared in eighty-one games, thirty-seven as first baseman, twenty-nine as outfielder, and fifteen on the mound. He won four and lost four with a 2. 83 earned run average while batting . 285. Comparing his hitting and pitching skills, Rickey placed Sisler at first base in 1916.
From 1917 through 1922 Sisler's hitting averaged . 374 per year, topped by . 407 in 1920 and . 420 in 1922, both league-leading scores. His . 420 average is the third highest in baseball history. Sisler's premier year was 1920, when he had a single-season all-time record 257 hits and career bests of 19 home runs, 18 triples, 49 doubles, 122 runs batted in, and 137 runs scored.
For Sisler, 1923 was a disastrous year. A chronic sinus condition worsened by an influenza attack affected his optic nerve, causing double vision. Sisler was forced to sit out the year while undergoing a sinus operation and a tonsillectomy. With his status as a player still uncertain, Sisler signed on in October as Browns manager for the 1924 season, succeeding Jimmy Austin. Not until March 1924 did Sisler announce himself fit to play, despite some lingering vision problems. Although he remained in the major leagues for seven more years, he insisted that his real career ended with the 1923 season.
For the next three years Sisler both played and managed for the Browns. In 1924 he hit . 305 as the Browns finished fourth in the standings with a 74-78 record. In 1925 the Browns improved to third place at 82-71, and Sisler batted . 345. Sisler hit . 290 in his final year as manager, while the team's standing fell to seventh with a 62-92 slate.
In 1927 club president Philip Ball sold Sisler to the Washington Senators. Relegated to the role of utility player, Sisler appeared with the Senators in only twenty games of the 1928 season, batting . 245 before being sold in May to the Boston Braves of the National League. In 118 games with Boston, Sisler hit . 340 with sixty-eight runs batted in and seventy-one runs scored. Sisler played two more years with the Braves, hitting . 326 in 1929 and . 309 as player-coach in 1930.
Released by the Braves and not picked up by any other major league squad, Sisler entered the minor leagues for the first time in 1931. With Rochester of the International League, he batted . 303 in 159 games, helping the St. Louis Cardinals farm team win the Minor League World Series. The next year, as player-manager of Shreveport-Tyler in the Texas League, Sisler appeared in 70 games hitting . 287.
After the 1932 season Sisler left professional baseball for ten years, lending his name to a St. Louis printing company and a sporting goods firm. He also operated softball parks in the St. Louis area and in 1939 became commissioner of the National Baseball Congress, a nationwide semiprofessional organization.
In 1950 Sisler was chosen to the all-time all-star team in a national poll of baseball writers. In 1943 Sisler returned to the major leagues as a scout for the Brooklyn Dodgers under General Manager Branch Rickey. He remained a scout for the team until 1965.
He died in St. Louis.
At Ann Arbor, Sisler met his future wife, Kathleen Holznagle. Married in 1916, they had four children. All three of his sons also had careers in baseball.