sports spotlight: al solenberger
Al Solenberger
By Mike Tupa
Bartlesville Area Sports Report
AL SOLENBERGER
By Mike Tupa
Bartlesville Area Sports Report
Al Solenberger was a man of his time and a man for his time.
Fate robbed him of his chance to play Major League Baseball — a fate called World War II.
Fortunately, Solenberger's truncated diamond destiny would result in the blessing of hundreds of young men in Washington County.
Even though his minor league baseball biography lists him as just 5-foot-6, 150 pounds, the man they called “Solly” would become a local towering legend.
Born in 1925, Springfield, Ohio, Solly displayed plenty of baseball potential. But then Uncle Sam came calling. Instead of wielding a baseball bat he ended up toting a gun.
Solly was like hundreds of other veterans who saw their hopes derailed by the war — they came back home with their boyhoods left behind on battlefields, but their boyhood dreams of returning to ballfields still alive.
Despite the physical and emotional wounds they carried around as abiding souvenirs of war, they flocked to minor league diamonds — many yearning to recapture innocence through baseball.
Solenberger was better than most of the returnees.
In 1947 he batted .321, scored 131 runs, ripped 27 doubles, drove in 70 runs and recorded a .431 on-base percentage for the Bartlesville Pirates of the Kansas Oklahoma Missouri (KOM) Class D League, an affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
After also kicking around in the minors in Illinois and California, Solenberger would finish up in 1951 back at Bartlesville, putting together a .300 batting average with a .440 OBP, 18 doubles, 113 runs and 54 RBIs.
He then settled down in Bartlesville, where he would wed his beautiful wife Madeleine, a native of Peru, Kan.
In 1964, Solenberger took charge of the Bartlesville American Legion Baseball majors team, sponsored by Doenges Ford. During Solly's 11 seasons with the Legion program, Bartlesville won 363 games and qualified in 1969 for the American Legion World Series.
Solly also organized a parents committee that took care of all the ancillary details (concessions, selling tickets, cleaning the facility, maintenance of the field and facility, keep track of funds, compiling statistics, etc.), which freed him and assistant Vic Baginski to focus on preparing the players for success on the field.
The formula continued to be successful for 25 years after Solly retired.