The first installment to Darden’s column on the Forgotten & Misunderstood Stories of Baylor
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My generation studied the backs of baseball cards and album jackets. I can still recall every player on the 1964 St. Louis Cardinals … their batting averages and a host of other equally obscure, sometimes arcane, facts. We endlessly organized and reorganized our card collections. We wheeled and dealed and learned the fine art of baseball management by trading duplicate cards. We spent our allowances and mowing money on them. But mostly we endlessly discussed them.
The first time I probably heard of Baylor University was from the back of one of Ted Uhlaender’s baseball cards. It was because of my cards that I knew, for instance, that Cardinals Dick Groat went to Duke and Bob Gibson attended Creighton.
When I arrived at Baylor University with my friend Jimmy King in the August 1972, the first person I met was E.E. “Dutch” Schroeder, Baylor’s legendary baseball coach. We remained friends until Schroeder’s passing a few years ago.
And Ted Uhlaender was one of Dutch’s all-time favorite players. It’s not hard to see why.
In fall 1957, just 5’9” weighing only 129 pounds Theodore Otto “Ted” Uhlaender journeyed from McAllen to Waco and asked to try-out for the baseball team. As a non-scholarship walk-on, he led the freshman team in hitting. Schroeder told The Baylor Line that Ted would arrive early every morning and take two hours of batting practice with the pitching machine.
“He loaded up the balls. He would hit every ball, run to the outfield and pick up the balls, load them back in, and get back in there and hit until he had calluses on his hands. He wanted to be a ball player.”
When Schroeder took over the team the following year, Uhlaender became his starting catcher, spending his spare time in the weight room developing his body. “He was the kind of hitter who was tremendously fast,” Dutch told The Lariat. “And batting left-handed he got the jump and beat out a lot of hits.”
By his junior year, Uhlaender was one of the Southwest Conference’s leading hitters, batting a sizzling .365. Ted was all-Southwest Conference in baseball three times.
“He went out for the wrestling team and learned to be a competitive person,” Schroeder recalled. “Before he was through playing for us, I had to keep him from taking on the football players.”
Uhlaender was serious about his studies as well, majoring in statistics. In an oral history interview, Baylor professor Dr. Raymond Read said that, even as an undergraduate, Ted had been so capable that he was Read’s statistics lab instructor.
When Uhlaender graduated in 1961, he had grown five inches and bulked up to 190 pounds. He wrangled an invitation to the Minnesota Twins’ lowest farm club in Wytheville, Virginia, but injured his knee. When he returned the following year, he was assigned to AA Durham. The club switched him to the outfield, where he broke his right hand in spring training. Disillusioned, Ted told The Line that he strongly considered returning to Baylor, and even registered for botany and organic chemistry classes, with an eye towards becoming a veterinarian.
But someone in the Twins organization had seen something in Uhlaender and convinced him to report to Erie in the New York-Pennsylvania League. By season’s end, Ted led the league in hitting with a .342 average. The following season, the Twins assigned him to AAA Denver in the Pacific Coast League, their top minor league team, for the 1965 season. Ted responded by leading the PCL in hitting with a .340 average and even received a September call-up, though he was ineligible to play for the pennant-winning Twins. In 1966, Uhlaender started the season in Denver but by June his robust hitting prompted another call to The Show – where he remained.
Thus began an eight-year major league career with the Twins, Cleveland Indians, and ending with the Cincinnati Reds. Uhlaender finished in the Top 10 in hitting in the American League twice, led the league in fielding once and made three errors or less for five of those years. “I was not,” Ted to The Line, “bottom of the barrel.” He finished his career with the fearsome Big Red Machine in Cincinnati, where he earned a coveted World Series ring in 1972.
When Uhlaender’s major league career ended, he coached for several teams, both in the minor and major leagues, spending the 2000s as a coach with the Cleveland Guardians (then called the Indians) and San Francisco Giants.
Along the way, he met his wife Karen, a ski instructor, on the slopes of Copper Mountain and Breckenridge. The couple had five children and lived during the off-season on a ranch near Parshall, Colorado.
When I read in The Line that Ted Uhlaender had died of bone marrow cancer in 2009 at the too-young age of 68, I immediately remembered his baseball cards.
But that’s not where this story ends.
• • •
One of Ted and Karen’s children, daughter Katie, born on July 17, 1984, was different. Raised in Breckenridge, Katie was an athlete – and a fearless one, at that. While skiing in 2003, her friend, bobsledder Sara Sprung, suggested that she try the skeleton, a particularly dangerous downhill sport where riders hurdle face-first on their stomachs down bobsled chutes atop little more than a frame of a sled. It’s a brutal sport, one that combines a knowledge of aerodynamics and the rider’s subtle movements to influence (not guide) a missile rocketing at 80 miles per hour down an icy corridor. As they battle G-force pressures, a neck strap holds the athlete’s head up. Injuries are frequent. Katie (who played baseball on a boy’s team) was delighted. She threw herself into the sport. Within a couple of months, she was ranked in the world top 10 in skeleton.
No one was prouder than her father. When she confessed her fears to him before the final qualifying event for the 2006 Olympics, Ted quietly took her aside and told her about the first time he walked to the plate for the Twins in Yankee Stadium. His knees shook, he said: “You can get in the batter’s box, cross yourself and all that, but you’re on your own. Same thing with skeleton. When you get on that sled, the team ain’t helping you.” She would call him before each race, regardless of where the event was taking place.
Relentlessly pushing herself, Katie qualified for and finished sixth in the 2006 Olympic games in Turin, Italy, and despite injuring her right knee while skiing in 2008, had high hopes for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia.
But by 2009, she knew her father was dying. Katie repeatedly returned home to assist in his care. Ted died two weeks before the World Championships.
In his honor, Katie wore his 1972 Cincinnati Reds championship ring around her neck, along with a tiny baseball pendant containing some of his ashes.
“He made me feel like a warrior,” she told David Ramsey of the Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colorado). “He gave me purpose, and when he passed away, I lost that purpose. I had a ton of passion and no place to put it.”
Spurred by her father’s memory, Katie steeled herself as the Olympics approached. “I was shattered,” she told Ramsey. “I had to create a mosaic. I found those pieces, but people helped me put it together. It’s just given me an overwhelming sense of responsibility. To not let those people down who helped me get there.” Including her father. Katie finished 11th in Vancouver.
Katie Uhlaender continued to compete in the skeleton. She won a number of medals in the World Championships but an Olympic medal eluded her. In the controversial 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, she finished fourth by .04 seconds behind the Russian Elena Nikitina. But the International Olympic Committee discovered that dozens of Russian athletes had used performance-enhancing drugs and voided Nikitina’s bronze medal. But later IOC decisions never awarded Katie the disputed medal.
“He made me feel like a warrior.”
With typical Uhlaender tenacity, Katie qualified for both the 2018 Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea and then the 2022 games in Beijing – at the age of 37. In January 2023, she ruptured the tendon in her right ankle while sledding.
In December of ‘23, she was admitted to Columbia University to finish, at long last, her undergraduate degree. Katie vowed to work ceaselessly to qualify for her sixth Olympics, Milan in 2026, even while commuting from Nantucket to New York City for college.
I hope she makes it.
• • •
Because of the Baylor connection, I thought I might still have at least one of my old Ted Uhlaender baseball cards – so many have slipped away during my various moves over the past 60 years – but no. Fortunately, I found a copy at Bankston’s Comics & Collectibles of the one I remembered best, his goofy card with the Minnesota Twins from 1968. The card features a steely-eyed Ted with a big chaw of tobacco in his cheek as he stares at an imaginary pitcher, a portrait of resolution and determination.
Looking at this baseball card, I am again reminded that every picture tells a story.
And sometimes it tells two.
