I was going to include Clancy Smyres in my book, The League of Outsider Baseball. The reasn I didn't was that I coundn't find a photo of him from his playing days! The closest I came was a New Orleans newspaper from 1945 that had a large and very clear photo of the Pelicans team - but then at the bottom it said "missing: Ckancy Smyres"! Any other newspaper photo I found was too dark to be useful.
When I was writing his story, the only reason I could think has something to do with his wanting nothing to do with baseball later was that he was treated pretty lousy by the press when he came to the Dodgers. It looked like he had injured his arm and the Dodgers brought him up anyway. Durocher was not happy with his performance, and the NY press had nothing nice to say, even blaming his problems on his originally being a softball player. This was worded in a way to sound like Smyres was at fault for playing softball first. He quit pro ball after 1945.
So, his getting slapped around on his only MLB stint could have clouded his outlook on the game and made him just want to forget about it. I thought about contacting his son, but in the end I didn't want to restart any bad emotions in the family. Sometimes you just have to leave things alone.
I'd love to hear if anyone else has a theory.
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