June 30, 2023

By Melissa Verge

Canadian Baseball Network

The job is unpaid, labour intensive and in an extremely fast paced environment.

Six-year-old John Upham is sold.

The benefits cancel out the non-existent pay. Running to pick up baseball bats discarded at home plate is a dream position for a young kid who’s just discovering his passion for the sport.

Dirt under foot and sun above, Upham faithfully reports for his job as bat boy in Windsor, Ont. It’s the summer of 1948. Technically he can’t drive to work for another 10 years, but that’s not a concern in the hiring process. His transportation is arranged for him, with his dad and two uncles playing the outfield, and his mom watching every game from the stands.

That humble start as bat boy was the now 82-year-old’s first of many jobs in baseball.

“I loved it, I just loved being around the ball diamond,” Upham said. “I loved being around the players and with my family particularly.

It was a passion that stuck with the young Canadian kid. As he grew in stature, so did his enthusiasm for the sport. Bat boy wasn’t the end all for him. He made it all the way from that field in Windsor picking up discarded bats, to playing nine seasons of professional baseball. In 1967, he made his major league debut with the Chicago Cubs, coming in as a reliever for now Hall of Famer Fergie Jenkins (Chatham, Ont.).

Jenkins remembers Upham clearly.

“He had a chance to come into some ball games that were quite crucial throwing against the left-handed hitters because he had a pretty good slider, a good fastball,” Jenkins said. “And the times that he pitched at Wrigley Field he did a great job.”

Although his days playing in the majors were short - ending one year after they began in 1968 - baseball remained a huge part of his life as he took on a coaching role.

A proud moment for Upham was taking the Windsor Senior Men’s Team to Newfoundland in 1982, where they won the Canadian championship. He was the pitching coach for Team Ontario who won gold at the Canada Summer Games in 1981 and 1985, and also served as the pitching coach for Canada at three consecutive World Junior Championships.

The impact he had on Canadian baseball is still felt - helping win games and influencing the next generation of young players even though his coaching days are behind him.

“The John Upham way” Tom Valcke calls it, who was a player on that 1982 Windsor Chiefs team that won the championship.

From the time Valcke met him when he was about 16, to 26, to his coaching career now as a 62-year-old, the former Cubs player had an incredible influence on the coaching decisions he makes at the ball field. He uses a lot of the techniques he learned as a player from Upham in his coaching today.

Although Valcke said he’s always open to change and learning new ways of coaching, the way that he did things “stood the test of time.” It’s backed by the facts - the Chiefs won nine provincial championships, seven of those going on to win national championships, playing the way that he had taught them to play.

“I can't tell you how many times I looked up and I thanked John [during important games] even though I might've been hundreds of miles away from him,” Valcke said.

It was all in the small details. Upham was a strong believer in the delayed steal, which Valcke implements in his coaching regularly.

In the delayed steal you shuffle, square to the catcher, and wait until the ball is halfway to home plate before going. It was so successful, because when the ball gets halfway to the plate, players are locked in on the hitter, the bat and the ball, he said. So even if a runner was breaking right in front of the first baseman, they wouldn’t alert the catcher that they were going because they wouldn’t see it.

“It worked 95 per cent of the time the way John taught, like John just knew the way bodies worked, the way the human mind worked,” he said.

It was these details that he preached that made him so respected as a coach, and so successful.

In his eyes, Valcke said, who has witnessed coaches from coast to coast and been involved with baseball in Canada for 35 years, Upham is easily one of the best Canadian coaches of all time, who “absolutely belongs in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.”

The players that made up the Chiefs team were all baseball minded people, who breathed the game, but when Upham spoke, players listened, he said.

“Frankly we all knew a fair bit about the game but we couldn't squeeze enough out of John,” he said. “We all were thirsty for his type of knowledge, we wanted to hear what he had to say. We bought into him. And we were pretty proud guys, we thought very highly of ourselves, you have to be to win like we won, but most coaches would never have garnered that kind of respect that John had from the Windsor kids who he taught.”

“We just couldn't get enough out of the guy.”

And Upham couldn’t get enough of the sport.

Just like it was as a kid for him being bat boy during his dad and uncles’ baseball games, it’s been a family endeavor. His wife has always been a scorekeeper, and his granddaughter, Alexa Pandolfi, remembers going out to clinics he was hosting in Windsor, and helping out as a 12-year-old.

When he was at the ballpark, he would just completely light up, she said. He loved to help teach the kids how to play the sport and play it well.

“He was just so open with his knowledge and wanted to share with everybody,” Pandolfi said. “And just the joy on his face [was written all over it] when he was coaching a kid during batting practice and he went from striking out to hitting the ball.”

Even today. At 82, he still stays involved with the game, but it’s from a different vantage point off the field as a spectator to his grandsons’ games.

He enjoys watching the next generation of talent from the stands, and he’s thankful for the many incredible memories on the diamond he had, starting from his bat boy days, and ending with his coaching career.

“It gave me the opportunity to work with kids, make them better ball players but more importantly better people,” he said.