Hansen's Hundred, No. 63: Alex Kellner was first Tucsonan to make impact in MLB

Alex Kellner was the youngest professional athlete in Tucson history, signing with the Class D Tucson Cowboys of the Arizona-Texas League the day he graduated from Amphitheater High School in 1941.

He was 16.

In baseball lingo of the day, Kellner, a 6-foot-1-inch, 200-pound lefty, could “throw smoke." He had a wicked sidearm, almost submarine-type delivery that was so overpowering that the Cincinnati Reds signed him shortly after his 17th birthday and assigned him to the Class C Muskogee Reds.

No one else on the team was younger than 20. Kellner went 11-7. He was on track for the major leagues before he was old enough to vote.

But he was old enough to be drafted into World War II, enlisting in the Navy in the spring of 1943, which paused his pitching career for four seasons.

Kellner, who is No. 63 on our list of the Top 100 Tucson Sports Figures of the last 100 years, returned from World War II and pitched for the semi-pro Azteca Warriors. A scout from the Philadelphia A’s watched Kellner pitch and sent a telegram to Philadelphia manager Connie Mack, suggesting they buy Kellner’s rights from the Reds.

Home run.

By July 1949, Kellner was selected to the American League team for the All-Star Game, on the same roster with Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. He went 20-12 for the A’s that season, a rising star, the first Tucson-raised ballplayer to make an impact in pro sports.

A few days before the '49 All-Star Game, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: “Kellner has burst into the American League with the startling suddenness of a meteor."

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That was the peak of Kellner’s baseball career. He was 25. Arm trouble cost him several mph off his fastball, but he kept on pitching. There was no “Tommy John" surgery in the 1950s; most pitchers who injured their arm just gutted it out.

Yet Kellner “gutted it out" for 12 years, winning 101 big-league games before retiring after the 1959 season.

“Watch him in there," his 1950s Philadelphia manager Eddie Jost said. “On the mound, he’s cold as ice. He doesn’t know what it’s like to get shaky. "

Kellner comes from what is probably Tucson’s leading baseball family ever. His grandfather pitched in the dedication game of Randolph Park — now Hi Corbett Field — in the 1920s. His brother, Walt Kellner, an Amphi and UA standout pitcher, joined Alex on the Philadelphia roster in 1954. His nephew, Joey Kellner, was a key relief pitcher for Arizona’s 1980 College World Series championship team, and another nephew, Frank Kellner, played seven years of minor-league baseball, including two stints with the Triple-A Tucson Toros.

The family was so keyed to baseball that Alex was named after baseball pitching legend Grover Cleveland Alexander. His brother, Walt, was named after Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson.

“My dad used to take me out in the pasture near our farm and teach me how to pitch,'" Alex Kellner told me in a 1991 interview while sitting in the bleachers at Hi Corbett Field. “He was a submariner, who taught me all I knew about pitching. When I got to the pros, they changed my throwing motion. I always wondered if that caused me some arm problems."

Other than winning his 20th game on the last weekend of the 1949 season, the top moment in Kellner’s career probably came during a pennant race victory over the Yankees that season. An overflow crowd of 34,355 squeezed into the A’s Shibe Park to watch the game. Another 13,000 were turned away at the gate.

Kellner beat the Yankees with a five-hitter, striking out DiMaggio to end the game.

In his post-baseball days, Kellner worked for Sundt Construction, helped sustain the family farm/ranch near the Rillito wash and was a hunting guide. He died when he was 71 in 1996.