Tucson High's Bill Hassey slides into third base during a 1945 Tucson High School baseball game. Arizona Daily Star file photo
May 3, 1946: Tucson High wins eighth straight state title in baseball
The records created when Tucson High School won the state baseball championship each season from 1939 to 1946 have long confused those who tried to keep up.
The Badgers won a state-record 52 consecutive games against high school competition from 1942-46, but some of that was misleading. Coaches Andy Tolson and Hank Slagle would often play six or eight games a season against the UA freshman team.
A few times they played games against teams from California after they won the state championship.
Sometimes those games would be added to the team’s record, such as in 1945, when the Badgers are listed by the AIA to have finished 16-5. In fact, they were 12-0 in high school games.
The Badgers of that era were so good that they won state title games 20-0, 16-0 and 14-0. The only advantage they had was that all eight of those games were played at the UA baseball facility as part of “University Week,” at which the state baseball, track and tennis championships were played in Tucson from 1912-1949.
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Tucson’s streak began, innocently enough, on May 3, 1939, the day after Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-games streak of 2,130 games ended for the New York Yankees. As Gehrig tragically ended his baseball career, the Badgers rolled.
What strikes me most about the Badgers of ’39 to ’46 is how many of their key players became prominent in Tucson long after their high school championships.
- The ’39 team included star outfielder George Genung, after whom the Amphitheater High School gymnasium is named. Genung, who coached Amphi’s basketball team for almost 40 years, was one of the first American soldiers into Hitler’s Bavarian retreat, Berchtesgaden.
- The ’40 Badgers included outfielder Corky Moore, brother of prominent Tucson umpire/official Don Moore. Corky was killed by a Japanese sniper on Iwo Jima.
- The ’41 club, which went 12-0, not the 20-0 as listed by the AIA, included second baseman Bud Grainger, who went on to twice umpire at the College World Series championship game and work 192 games between Arizona and ASU.
- The ’42 Badgers included infielder George Bland, youngest brother of UA Sports Hall of Fame quarterback Ted Bland. George scored the winning run in the state championship game against Phoenix North and later became a charter member of the Tucson Conquistadores.
- The ’43 team was led by Gil Carrillo, who would coach Rincon High School to the 1963, 1964 and 1968 state championship games.
- The ’44 Badgers included Al Kivel, who has gone on to be one of the most prominent real estate developers in Tucson history.
- The ’45 THS team included three-time All-State outfielder Bill Hassey, whose son, Ron, caught three perfect games in the major leagues and was a first-team All-American at Arizona in 1976.
- The ’46 Badgers, who were 16-0 before losing to the San Diego city champions a week after the state title game, might’ve been as talented as any in Tucson history.
The ’46 roster included Brad Tolson, who would go on to win 17 consecutive games as an Arizona Wildcat; Cliff Myrick, who coached Catalina High to the 1967 state championship; Lee Carey, who coached the Badgers to the 1954 and 1955 state championships; Chet Vasey, who hit a state-record seven home runs in 1946; and Bob Murray, who became the UA’s first consensus All-American baseball player in 1950.
“We just didn’t lose,” Grainger told me in a 1999 interview. “Baseball was a way of life for us then. It was a good influence.”
Where are they now? Catcher Frank Kempf, who was a first-team All-State catcher in 1942 and 1943, was killed near Berlin as part of an American infantry unit late in World War II.
How they did it: After Andy Tolson coached the Badgers to the 1939, 1940 and 1941 state championships, he became the principal at Tucson High. He was replaced by Hank Slagle, who played four seasons in the minor leagues before returning to Tucson.
Slagle, who hit .507 as a UA catcher in 1937, coached 10 state baseball championships at THS and retired with a 161-37 record. Incredibly, Slagle has yet to be inducted into the Arizona Coaches Association Hall of Fame. After being principal at Rincon and Santa Rita high schools, he died in 2004; he was 88.
Photo: Tucson High's Bill Hassey slides into third base during a 1945 Tucson High School baseball game. Arizona Daily Star file photo
