White Sox second baseman Nellie Fox named '59 AL MVP

The last baseball season of the 1950s saw a scrappy team from Chicago flip the prevailing script of the decade that listed the New York Yankees as perennial pennant winners.

For the 1959 American League champion Chicago White Sox, there was arguably no brighter star than second baseman Nellie Fox.

On Nov. 12, 1959, the diminutive Fox was honored as the American League’s Most Valuable Player. Fox played a league-leading 156 games in 1959 while batting .306 and recording the second-most hits (191) and doubles (34) in the Junior Circuit. He also earned his 10th All-Star selection and second Gold Glove Award at second base.

Standing 5-foot-9 and weighing no more than 160 pounds, Fox was the iconic symbol of a lively club that would come to be affectionately known as the “Go Go Sox.” Crouched over the plate with a choked-up batting grip, Fox often set the table for a White Sox team that employed speed and timely hitting instead of power to generate runs.

In his autobiography "Veeck – As In Wreck", White Sox owner Bill Veeck wrote that his team needed Fox “no more than your baby needs milk.”

The White Sox were known as a talented bunch who couldn’t get over the hump for much of the 1950s. The team posted third-place finishes for five consecutive seasons until 1957, when Hall of Fame manager Al Lopez emerged from a temporary retirement to take over the club. Lopez’s aggressive tactics and overwhelming confidence in his players lit a fire under Chicago, and the team began nipping at the vaunted Yankees’ heels with second-place finishes in 1957-58.

Boosted by deals that netted them future Hall of Famers Larry Doby and Early Wynn, the Go Go Sox finally went all the way in 1959. The team got off to a hot start and never looked back, winning 94 games and capturing its first pennant since the tarnished Black Sox scandal of 1919.