1954 Yankee of the Past: Pat Malone

PAT MALONE'S BIG BETTING COUP
He Got 10-1 He Wouldn't Win and Lost, 1-0, In The 14t!
"It was in a general discussion of players' wages that Paul Richards, the White Sox manager, brought up the name of the late Pat Malone. It was back about 1938 that Malone, one-time Cub great, was hanging on with Chattanooga in the Southern Association and Richards was managing Atlanta in the same loop.
The Lookouts were the whipping boys for the rest of the circuit, especially New Orleans.
With Johnny Beazley and Al Jurisich pitching for New Orleans, Chattanooga used to take steady lickings. The odds were often as high as 8-1 as New Orleans bettors were hard-pressed to find anybody who wanted to wager on the visitors.
Malone mulled the situation over for a while and, all of a sudden, he became the hardest-working pitcher on the Chattanooga team. He cut down on his eating, ran his legs off in the outfield and pitched batting drill at least every other day.
Slowly, but surely, he worked himself back into a reasonable facsimile of his old major league form.
On the next trip to New Orleans, Pat had saved up two pay checks amounting to approximately $300. By this time Chattanooga was going so badly that the price, with Beazley hurling for New Orleans, was 10-1. This was what Malone had been waiting and working for. He asked Manager Rogers Hornsby to let him start that game.
It just so happened that Pat knew somebody who knew where a guy could invest in an afternoon of baseball and up went the $300 against $3,000 on Chattanooga.
Naturally it was all very hush-hush, because nobody is supposed to bet on baseball, except in the grandstands or the bleachers or cigar stores.
There should be a wonderful pot-of-gold ending to this story instead of the one with a moral twist. Malone pitched one of the greatest games of his life that day for a final, last-ditch grubstake. Beazley held Chattanooga to two hits. Malone got both, a double and a triple ... and got beat 1-0 in 14 innings!"

-John P. Carmichael, Chicago Daily News (Baseball Digest, May 1954)