Boylan baseball great Jake Smolinski set an area record last year -- kind of, maybe.
Smolinski, who powered the 2006 Boylan team to the Class AA state tournament with an 8-0 record on the mound and 13 home runs at shortstop, split his 13th professional season with the Durham Bulls in the AAA International League and the NC Dinos of the Korean Baseball Organization.
Smolinski ended up hitting 21 home runs in 122 games in both locations. That boosted his career professional home run total to 115. Eighty-five of those have come in 912 games in 13 minor league seasons. Fourteen have come in international play. Along with Korea, he twice played in the Mexican Pacific Winter League. And 16 home runs have come in parts of five major league seasons.
That appears to be an all-time professional career home run record of someone who grew up in the Rock River Valley, surpassing the 107 home runs of Andy "Turk" Skurski.
Skurski is a player I just happened along researching the archives. He was born in Rockford in 1915. He appeared in the local newspapers several times in the early 1930s as a basketball player for Muller’s Dairy, a semi-pro team that had quite a following.
In 1936, according to Baseball-Reference.com, Skurski started his pro baseball career playing for the Panama City Papermarks in the Class D Alabama-Florida League. For the next four seasons, Skurski kicked around a variety of low level minor leagues, playing in the South Atlantic League, Middle Atlantic League, Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League and Cotton States League. These were the days before television when minor league baseball was big business.
Skurski’s career was then interrupted by World War II. He spent most of it playing for the Camp Grant baseball team. Skurski was 30 when the war ended, but he caught on with Waterloo in the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League and hit .306 with 13 home runs.
That caught the eye of the Chicago White Sox, who signed him and took him to spring training in 1947. He didn’t make the White Sox and spent most of the next four seasons in the Pacific Coast League, one level down from the major leagues, playing for White Sox, Dodgers and Phillies affiliates.
He never got the call to the big leagues and in 1951 he began moving down the ladder. He played in Class A Colorado Springs for two seasons and finished with Edmonton in the Western International League.
Skurski finished with 107 home runs in 1,371 games. After retiring, Skurski went into private business for a few years before being named general manager in 1959 of the same Colorado Springs team that he previously played for. He later moved to Las Vegas and ran a real estate company. He died in 1989.
This is where the whole record thing gets murky. First of all, records on Rockford-area minor leaguers are incomplete. I’d never heard of Skurski until finding a clip about him. Second, it depends on how you define a Rockford-area player.
Josh Bell was born at Rockford Memorial Hospital in 1986. His family moved to Minnesota when he was 3, then returned for a year when he went to Maud Johnson Elementary for fourth grade. The next year, his family moved to Florida.
Bell has hit 166 home runs over 15 professional seasons. Only four of them came at the major league level. Josh played 100 games over parts of three seasons. Still, if you consider him a Rockford product, he is in the lead.
It’s unlikely either player will add to their totals this year. Bell, now 33, spent last year in the independent Atlantic League and that league already scrapped its season because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Smolinski did not re-sign in Korea and is a free agent. It’s unclear what his future plans are.
If you just want to count the major leagues, then the all-time area home run king remains Fred Schulte of Belvidere. Schulte hit 47 home runs over 1,179 games from 1927 to 1937 for the St. Louis Browns, Washington Senators and Pittsburgh Pirates.
Smolinski is second on that list -- unless you want to count Joe Charboneau. The 1980 American League Rookie of the Year was born in Belvidere, but his parents moved when he was 2 years old. “Super” Joe hit 23 home runs with 87 RBIs as a 25-year-old rookie.
Unfortunately, Charboneau injured his back on a head first slide into second base in spring training in 1981 and was never the same. He hit only six more home runs for the Indians in 1981 and 1982. Cleveland released him after that season. He was out of baseball after 1984 -- except for a one-game cameo in the Frontier League in 2000.
“Super” Joe ended strong, though. He hit a single in his only at bat.
