If you want something badly enough, you’ll keep at it. James R. Turner wanted to pitch in the major leagues. He played fourteen years in the minors before getting that opportunity, and when it finally arrived, you can bet he made the most of it. Turner started his professional baseball career in 1923 as a pitcher with Paris, Tennessee, in the Kitty League. He toiled in the lower minor leagues for the next five years and then went to Hollywood in the Pacific Coast League. He would return to Nashville each fall and work as a route man for his family’s dairy, earning him the baseball nickname of “Milkman Jim.” After three more seasons at Hollywood and another four in Indianapolis, Turner finally got “the call,” and at the age of 32, he went to the Boston Braves as the oldest rookie in the majors. Turner won twenty games for the fifth place Braves in 1937, turning in the best earned run average in the league and making him the first National League rookie to win twenty games since Grover Cleveland Alexander in 1911. Turner stayed with Boston until 1939, was traded to the Cincinnati Reds, and finished his career with the New York Yankees, retiring in 1945. He stayed with baseball as manager and pitching coach for various clubs, including a long stint with Casey Stengel’s World Champion Yankees. James R. Turner passed away in 1998 at the ripe old age of ninety-five, the only man in professional baseball history to play, manage, or coach for a record fifty-one consecutive seasons.
