Everyone has an equal chance (depending on off-season personnel moves and injuries).

And the possibilities are endless (at least through 162 games).

It’s a time to recall baseball and greater Peoria’s place in it, especially folks who’ve been overlooked while stars like Thomas and Girardi get current attention.

Like Clarence “Pants” Rowland.

Ninety-three years ago, the National Pastime was tainted by Chicago’s world-class White Sox losing games on purpose for money. But few realize that the corrupted team – the “Black Sox” – had been shaped in part by a Peorian with no major-league experience. Further, that man – Clarence Henry “Pants” Rowland — used his small-time success and small-town manners to attain a world title and invigorate an influential baseball career that lasted until the 1960s.

Rowland managed the Peoria Chiefs to the 1914 championship of the old Illinois-Iowa-Indiana (“Three-I”) League, a Class B minor league.  Rowland had grown up in Dubuque – although he was born in Platteville, Wis., on Feb. 12, 1879 – and first earned his nickname there.

“As a youngster, he worked as a hotel bell hop and first came into contact with the professional baseball players for Dubuque’s Three-I team,” according to the Biographical Dictionary of American Sports. “One of these players, upon learning Rowland’s first name, thought it inappropriate and started calling him ‘Pants.’ The nickname stuck.”

A longtime reserve catcher in the minors, Rowland began with Dubuque’s team in 1903, and became the club’s catcher/manager in 1907 and ‘08. After stints with teams in Aberdeen, S.D., Jacksonville, Ill., and Winnipeg, Canada, Rowland returned to Dubuque as the Three-I franchise’s manager and owner 1911-13.

Peoria’s was a losing team when Rowland came to Central Illinois the next year, but he immediately transformed it into a contender.

“An amiable, gregarious gentleman,” according to New York World-Telegram sportswriter Joe Williams, Rowland also ran “a pleasant taproom in Peoria.”

Indeed, city records from 1914 show Rowland working in the Chiefs’ office in the Jefferson Building – as well as the ball park in the Averyville neighborhood – and at a place on 324 S. Washington, which may have been an apartment or a tavern. Regardless, Rowland’s Peoria team won that year.

On the advice of some baseball executive, Rowland came to the attention of the White Sox. According to the New York Times, Three-I League president Al Tierney said Peoria’s Rowland was “one of the most businesslike managers in baseball, and, given a fair chance, would be certain to make his mark in the major leagues.”

Others say it was happenstance – at Rowland’s taproom.

“Ban Johnson, president of the American League, and Charley Comiskey, owner of the club, patronized his place on hunting junkets during the winter,” Williams claimed.

Regardless of which version is true, Comiskey definitely hired Rowland on December 17, 1914 – an unusual move.

“Certainly it was the most daring experiment a club owner ever made,” Williams recalled decades later. “Astonishingly, it proved to be a stroke of genius.”

And how. Directing the 1915 White sox from the third-base coaching box, rookie major-league manager Rowland in his first year piloted the team to third place – the highest the club had finished in eight years. That quieted a few of the critics who sneered at Comiskey for “digging a manager out of the bushes.”

On Rowland’s advice, the Sox brought up several of his outstanding players from Peoria, including pitcher Red Faber. Together with the White Sox’ buying star second baseman Eddie Collins from the Philadelphia Athletics and young pitcher Happy Felsch from minor-league Milwaukee, the club continued to improve.

Acquiring the already-legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson from Cleveland in August helped end the season on an up note and carried over to 1916, when the Sox competed in a three-way race, finishing in second place.

With a 1917 roster including Jackson, plus Eddie Cicotte, Collins, Felsch, Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver and Lefty Williams, and the team won 100 games. Eight of Rowland’s stars later would be implicated in the Black Sox scandal, but Rowland became the first skipper this century to win a pennant without big-league playing experience. Despite the achievement, Rowland wasn’t appreciated by veterans, embraced by the press, nor recognized by fans. Some blame a quiet, polite demeanor that didn’t boost his own status, and others an “evenhanded approach to management” that wasn’t controversial.

“Rowland was a true leader,” the Associated Press said. “He never bawled a player out for a mistake or tried to rile his players hoping for a better effort. He cajoled and jollied his men.”

In the 1917 World Series, those men defeated the New York Giants – steered by the legendary John McGraw – four games to two. Cicotte outpitched his Giants counterpart in Game 1, and in the next nine days the former Peoria hurler Red Faber started four games and won three of them. Collins batted .409 in the Series.

Williams said anybody might have done that well with that lineup.

“About all Rowland had to do was to make out the batting order and name the starting pitcher,” Williams wrote, “although when he had to make pitching changes or send up pinch hitters, it seemed to me that his judgment was every bit as sound as that of other managers held in greater awe.”

And, in fact, says baseball historian Bill James, Rowland might be credited with helping to make commonplace the idea of platooning – playing right-handed batters to face left-handed pitchers, and vice versa.

“If you look at the Giants’ lineup,” James notes, “it’s basically a right-handed hitting lineup, so that may imply that Pants Rowland in 1917 was selecting his starters with recognition of the platoon advantage.”

His World Series victory was the White Sox’ second, having defeated the Cubs in 1906.

The White Sox Encyclopedia reports a World Series cident that exemplifies a self-effacing attitude that encouraged some to attack Rowland, described as “diplomatic to the extreme”:

“Always the gentleman, manager Rowland extended his hand in friendship to Giants manager John McGraw following the last out,” it’s written. “[He said,] ‘Mr. McGraw, I’m glad we won, but I’m sorry you had to be the one to lose.’ McGraw frowned: ‘Get away from me you damned busher!’ Such was the level of respect.”

In 1918, Jackson, Felsch, Risberg and other players were pressed into service for World War I-related activities, and the White Sox faded fast and early, finishing sixth. Rowland was fired on New Year’s Eve, replaced by his player/coach William “Kid” Gleason for the turbulent, infamous 1919 season.

Although Rowland reportedly took it hard, he stayed in the game, managing Milwaukee’s minor-league club in 1919 before managing in Columbus, Ohio, for three years. Then Rowland’s career took a turn, as he became an American League umpire for five seasons.

“One day, Pants Rowland was umpiring a game at Yankee Stadium,” the Associated Press reported years later, “The Yankee rightfielder, a fellow named Ruth, ran from first to third on a single to deepest right. He slid into the bag, safe by a mile.

“‘You’re out!’ yowled Rowland.

“The Babe, furious at such injustice, scrambled to his feet and rushed at the umpire. ‘What?’ he shouted.

“‘That was a great slide, Babe,’ said Rowland as he brushed off Ruth’s uniform. ‘That was one of the greatest slides I ever saw in my life. I didn’t know you could run bases like that. You’re certainly the greatest all-round player in history.’

“When the chagrined Ruth returned to the bench, [Yankee player] Bob Meusel asked, ‘What did you tell that clown?’

“‘Tell him?’ roared the Babe. ‘What could I tell him while he was brushing off my uniform? All I could do was search my pockets for a dime to tip him’.”

Oddly, during this time – years after the Black Sox scandal – Swede Risberg accused Rowland of fixing four games with Detroit after the Sox had clinched the 1917 pennant. But Rowland was acquitted in a 1926 proceeding and remained an ump. However, umpiring “went against his grain of conviviality,” the New York Times reported in Rowland’s 1969 obituary. “His suit was the administration of affairs and managing men.”

So he did, leaving his umpire job to manage the Southern Association’s Nashville franchise.

Then Rowland became a top scout for the Chicago Cubs in the early ‘30s, when Philip Wrigley took over the club. Along with field manager Charlie Grimm, Rowland became a key man for Wrigley, and was instrumental in acquiring Dizzy Dean from the St. Louis Cardinals. That fireballer’s pitching arm was gone, but – “pitching on memory,” Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman noted – Dean’s 7-1 record helped the Cubs win the 1938 pennant.

Rowland continued as a scout and administrator for the Cubs until 1944, when he became president of the Pacific Coast League. Under his leadership, the league prospered and almost became the third major league in 1945, as Rowland foresaw the sport’s drift westward.

“The men who control major league baseball are merely postponing the inevitable,” Rowland said after owners voted against changing the league. “Millions of baseball-minded people in the states of California, Washington and Oregon want better than minor-league baseball.”

Resigning in 1954, Rowland returned to the Midwest, where he resumed duties with the Cubs as an executive.

He “served the Cubs for almost as long as [equipment manager Yosh] Kawano in a variety of jobs,” Holtzman continued, “ranging from scout to vice president and unofficial assistant general manager.”

Rowland died at the age of 91 in a Chicago nursing home on May 17, 1969, still an honorary vice president of the Cubs — who were in first place that day.

He’s earned a place in the Greater Peoria Sports Hall of Fame.