Sacharski, Jerome J.
(Feb. 6, 1916 - Feb. 27, 2009)
Tee ball inventor

The baseball world lost the discoverer of tee ball when Jerome "Jerry" J. Sacharski died after suffering a stroke at his home in Albion, Michigan, about 85 miles from Detroit. His interest in baseball however, is traced to the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis, where the Polish people worshipped baseball stars like "Big Ed" Konetchy, Al Simmons, and Tony Kubek, who came from their own kind in Wisconsin. Jerome was born in West Allis to Michael and Martha Sacharzewski and raised in a robust neighborhood of German and Polish families. In 1920, when Michael Sacharzewski was a salesman for a wholesale grocery company, 555 of the 13,756 persons in the city were from Poland, and no matter where his four sons played baseball, their names were misspelled, abbreviated, twisted, and whatever came to the mind of a scorekeeper. That's why Aloysius Szymanski changed his name to Simmons, and the Sacharzewskis, whose name was too long to fit on a scorecard, was shortened to Sacharski.

Not much more is known of Michael Sacharzewski, who came from Bialystok in eastern Poland in 1907, and his wife, Martha, who was born in Wisconsin, the daughter of German immigrants. Jerome settled in 1942 with his wife, Etola, at Albion, a factory town in Calhoun County, Michigan, when he was employed as athletic director and coach at a boarding school named Starr Commonwealth, founded in 1913 by Floyd Starr to help troubled boys, 12 to 18 years of age, and turn their lives in new directions. Then he served in the Army during the Second World War and after taking off his second lieutenant's uniform, he returned to teach history, literature and Latin in the Albion public schools. Although the non-whites grew to 39 percent, the population of Albion remained about 9,000 persons from 1930 to 2,000. Until 1980, he was a teacher in the public schools and coach of the high school athletic teams.

Beginning in 1954, Sacharski took over Albion's recreation department and made baseball the most popular sport in the summer of the diverse population. For the smaller boys, 6 to 8 years of age, who came to Albion's Victory Park in the morning of June 25, 1956, the coach rigged up a tee, adjusted to the belly button of a batter, and showed the youth how to swing at a stationary ball on the tee with a bat, attempting to put it in play, and have players at each base and in the outfield ready to field it. Unlike baseball, it omitted a pitcher and a catcher. No kid went home from Victory Park the first day of the experiment without a turn at bat. Pretty soon the people of Albion called the game Pee Wee baseball.

Little did Sacharski know that other persons would lay credit for inventing the game of tee ball. To make a name for himself, Dayton Hobbs, an elementary school principal in Bagdad, Florida, near Pensacola, applied for a patent in 1970, four years after the game was first played in Albion, Michigan. For his part, Sacharski told a reporter of the Battle Creek Enquirer in 2006 on the fiftieth anniversary of the first game in Albion, "The greatest kick I ever got was teaching the kids how to start out. That's what was important to me."

Sixty boys played Pee Wee baseball in Albion in 1956; 185 in 1958, and 228 in 1960. The novelty caught on and spread like wildfire from Albion. Pee Wee baseball, T-ball, or whatever you want to call it, is now played by more than two million children in the United States. Teams were often named after television or cartoon characters. One year President George W. Bush sponsored a game of T-ball for kids on the White House lawn.

Sacharski spent the waning years of his teaching career preparing a video of instructions. After that he came out each summer to watch the practices and games. He had three sons by Etola and they followed in his footsteps. After a funeral Mass in St. John's Catholic Church, the unsung hero of T-ball was laid to rest at Riverside Cemetery in Albion. Hopefully, the epitaph on his gravestone will be inscribed, "Father of Pee Wee Baseball."

From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)