Happy 70th Birthday, Phil Garner!

Happy 70th birthday to Phillip Mason Garner, infielder and manager extraordinaire!

The native east Tennessean was born in Jefferson City and graduated from Knox Bearden before playing baseball at the University of Tennessee before embarking on a major league baseball career that would see him set the record for highest batting average in the World Series and lead the Houston Astros to their first-ever pennant.

Garner was the son of a police officer in Grainger County where he was known as a young boy to buy cookies for three cents at a local store then sell them to prisoners at the local jail for a nickel. Moving ot Knoxville in large part because there was not a high school baseball program in Grainger County at the time, he went on to play for the Volunteers, slugged 12 home runs in a 33 game season in 1969, and was a contemporary of Phil Fulmer, who famously was on the phone with Garner around the time he became the Vols head football coach in 1992.

At 5–10 and 175 pounds Garner’s body type wasn’t that impressive to scouts, but his style of play was. Nicknamed “Scrap Iron,” Garner so impressed manager Chuck Tanner with his hustling style of play that when Tanner became the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1977 he insisted the Bucs give the A’s a bevy of six talented players, including future home run champion Tony Armas and four of the 12 pitchers who had pitched for the Pirates the year before, to obtain him.