Finding Pinky’s Pinkie

Down a rabbit hole and into the Platinum Age of comic strips in search of the origins of a baseball nickname.

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Today’s post spins off of our recent series on baseball’s best alliterative names. When we got to the letter “P”, there weren’t many contenders, but one name caught our eye.

Clarke Alonzo Pittenger was born in 1899. His formative years were spent mainly in Toledo, Ohio, and baseball doesn’t seem to have been a big part of his childhood picture there. Instead, Pittenger starred at basketball, playing forward at Waite High School and Toledo College, interrupted by a brief and timely enlistment in the United States Army. As luck would have it, World War I ended before Private Pittenger got anywhere near a troop ship, and he was discharged, free to return to school and sports.

By 1919, Pittenger was a two-sport athlete. He had discovered professional baseball and was good enough at it to be signed by a Class B team based in London, Ontario, the Tecumsahs. He hit above .300 in two seasons there and showed his fast-break speed on the basepaths. In the winter of 1919. he was also playing basketball, for an industrial team in Toledo. In a report on the team’s status that December, Pittenger was mentioned by a different name:

Suey Welch … has signed “Pinky” Pittenger for his basketball squad, declared by Toledo sports writers as the greatest play in that section of the country.

“Pinky,” eh?