Imagine giving up a promising baseball career to become a landman and wildcatter in the oil business. That’s what Francis “Frank” Saucier did when he saw more potential in oil than baseball.
At 98, the Amarilloan and former outfielder for the St. Louis Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles) has seen almost a century of booms and busts and war and peace.
Saucier was born in 1926 on a Missouri farm, educated in a one-room schoolhouse and carried water to wheat field workers for 25 cents a day at age 6. By 10, the youngest of six children founded a fur-trapping enterprise with a Remington rifle, earning money for used books.
As a teen, Saucier heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor as he and his cousin walked home from a movie. “A Model T pulled up with folks who shared the news. I had no idea where Pearl Harbor was,” he says with a soft-spoken West Texas drawl in a recent interview at his home, where he displays baseballs signed by Hall of Famers Satchel Paige and Rogers Hornsby. “My family did not own a radio, so I raced home to tell them about the bombing.”
The day after his 17th birthday, Saucier enlisted in the Navy, where he enrolled in the V-12 officer training program at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. As an apprentice seaman, Saucier says, “My rank was so low I could crawl under a rattlesnake’s belly under a wagon wheel with a stovepipe hat on.”
Saucier served on an amphibious warfare commando team—a forerunner to the Navy SEALs. “President Truman dropped the first atomic bomb when we were about 1,000 miles from Japan,” he says. “Though there was no alcohol on board the ship, we had a big party and thought, ‘By golly, we made it.’ ”
Strong farm-boy wrists from swinging an axe and milking cows had helped make Saucier a star hitter in college. After the war, he signed a minor-league contract, won three batting titles and was named player of the year in 1950 by The Sporting News.
Still, fame never stopped Saucier from taking offseason roustabout jobs in the oil fields, where he invested his baseball earnings to drill for crude, which was then selling for about $3 a barrel.
He signed with the Browns in 1951, realizing a childhood dream conjured on the wooden grandstand at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. He played with or against Ted Williams, Yogi Berra, Minnie Miñoso and Paige along with Texans Dr. Bobby Brown and Eddie Robinson.
But Saucier is most remembered for a wacky public relations stunt engineered by Browns owner Bill Veeck, who brought in 3-foot-7-inch Eddie Gaedel to pinch-hit for Saucier during a game.
In 1952, Saucier was at spring training when he was called back to active duty during the Korean War. He’d already been dealing with chronic problems with his throwing arm, and after his discharge in 1954, he took a job as a district landman for Humble Oil Co. in Tyler.
Saucier never attended another major-league game. He worked in the oil and finance business until he was 85.
Regrets? No way.
“Baseball opened a lot of doors for me,” he says. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
