Two-time All-Star Charlie Maxwell has passed away, the Tigers announced today. The longtime Detroit outfielder was 97 years old.
A lifelong Michigan resident, Maxwell played college ball at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, working primarily as a pitcher during that time. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1945 and spent two years in the military before being discharged and joining the Red Sox minor league system as a pitcher, though he appeared in just ten games before converting to the outfield. Maxwell made his major league debut in 1950 with a three-game cup of coffee that saw him draw a walk and score a run but strike out three times without recording a hit in nine trips to the plate.
Maxwell bounced between the big league Red Sox and the club’s minor league system with lackluster results at the big league level for a number of years, hitting just .203/.289/.285 in parts of four seasons with the club while finding himself unable to secure a regular role. That all changed in 1955, when the Red Sox sold him to the Orioles. He made just four trips to the plate in Baltimore before being sold a second time, this time to his hometown Tigers. Maxwell’s career took off virtually from the moment he set foot in Detroit. Though he only appeared in 55 games for the club during the 1955 campaign, he made the most of every opportunity given to him with a solid .266/.325/.541 slash line that included 18 home runs in just 122 trips to the plate.
That substantial power earned Maxwell the Tigers’ starting left field job the following year, and he responded with the first All-Star appearance of his career. The slugger slashed an excellent .326/.414/.534 with 28 homers and more walks (79) than strikeouts (74). While standout performances from teammates Al Kaline and Frank Lary somewhat overshadowed Maxwell’s fantastic season, he nonetheless managed to earn some down-ballot consideration for the AL MVP award. The 1956 season was more of the same in many ways for Maxwell. While his numbers (.276/.377/.482 in 138 games) took a bit of a step back from his first season as a regular, Maxwell earned another All-Star appearance and some down-ballot AL MVP consideration despite being outmatched by fantastic seasons from teammates Kaline and Jim Bunning.
Those back-to-back All-Star campaigns were the strongest of Maxwell’s career, and he found himself comparing favorably with some of the league’s best players at the time. His 52 home runs across those two seasons were good for the 15th highest total in the majors, leaving him sandwiched between Hall of Famers Yogi Berra (54) and Kaline (50) on the league leaderboard. His 13.2% walk rate was the tenth-highest figure in the majors over those two seasons, and had more advanced metrics like wRC+ existed at the time Maxwell’s 140 figure for those two years would’ve put him just a hair behind the production of Hall of Famer Frank Robinson (141) over that same period.
Maxwell’s efforts over the remainder of his tenure in Detroit never quite resulted in a season that dominant again, but he still held his own at the plate with a solid .250/.348/.440 slash line with the Tigers from 1958 to 1961, a stretch which included a 31-homer campaign in 1959 and a third season where he garnered down-ballot MVP consideration in 1960. Maxwell’s tenure with the Tigers came to an end in 1962, however, as he hit just .194/.273/.269 in 30 games with the club before being traded to the White Sox.
Maxwell enjoyed something of a late-career resurgence upon arriving in Chicago and slashed a respectable .269/.382/.441 across three seasons as a part-time player for the club before hanging up the spikes two games into his age-37 season in Chicago. In all, Maxwell appeared in 1,133 games during his time in the majors while collecting 532 RBI, 148 home runs and 856 hits. He was a lifetime .264/.360/.451 hitter in 3,796 big league plate appearances. MLBTR sends our condolences to Maxwell’s family, friends, and loved ones.
