1955-1958

Billy Klaus was born on December 9, 1928, in Spring Grove, Illinois. He grew up in on a dairy farm of his grandfather, Joseph Klaus, who had immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1880s.

Immediately after graduating from Grant High School in neighboring Fox Lake, the 17-year-old began his baseball career in 1946 as a third basemen for the Appleton Papermakers in the Class D Wisconsin State League, the very bottom of the 11-club farm system of the Cleveland Indians. When it was determined that Cleveland had illegally signed him while he was still in high school, he became a free agent after the season.

The Chicago Cubs signed Billy and sent him to Centralia, Illinois, in the Class D Illinois State League for the 1947 season. At Centralia, he led the league in hitting with a .341 average. Those exploits earned him a promotion to Clinton, Iowa, in the Class C Central Association for the 1948 season.

His next stop was Springfield, Massachusetts, in the Class B New England League for the 1949 season, where he hit .327 to finish fourth among league hitters. In December 1949, he was selected in the minor-league draft by the unaffiliated Dallas club of the Double-A Texas League. 

The Milwaukee farm club of the Boston Braves system in the Triple-A American Association, purchased Billy's contract from Dallas. Within a 15-month time span, he rose from Class B to the Triple-A level, the highest in the minor leagues.

With Billy anchoring third base, the Milwaukee Brewers took first place in the American Association in 1951. The ball-club went on to win the league playoffs and the Junior World Series, defeating Montreal of the International League. Billy, who batted .285 for Milwaukee in 1951, was ostensibly a prime candidate for the Boston Braves’ third base position in 1952. However, future Hall-of-Famer Eddie Mathews took the job and held it for the next 15 seasons.

At the 1952 Braves camp in Bradenton, Florida, Billy needed to display all the spunk he could, to make the Braves team. While he made the major-league roster for the start of the season, he played in only seven games, before returning to Milwaukee in late April. He stayed in Milwaukee for the winter, working for the ball-club to sell season tickets for the newly constructed County Stadium.

The Braves relocated from Boston to Milwaukee for the 1953 season and Billy was kept on the Milwaukee Braves roster in 1953 as a reserve infielder. After he pinch-hit in two games that April, the Braves sent him down to Toledo in the American Association, where the Milwaukee minor-league franchise had relocated.

Before spring training began in 1954, the Braves sent Billy to the New York Giants, where he hit .280 at the Triple-A level with Minneapolis of the American Association. He continued to play hard-nose baseball and was voted the shortstop on the American Association all-star team at the end of the season.

In December 1954, the Giants traded him to the Red Sox. He still had to wait in line for an opportunity with the Red Sox. Manager Mike Higgins initially tabbed Milt Bolling as the top candidate for shortstop, and slated Billy for a tryout at third base. But Bolling fractured his elbow in a spring-training game and was out for two months. After watching two other players try to win the shortstop position earlier in the 1955 season, and being in a two-platoon system for a few weeks playing only against right-handed pitchers, Billy was anointed the club’s “regular” shortstop by Red Sox in June.

Billy seized the opportunity and collected four hits in five at-bats in his first game as the regular shortstop and became the sparkplug of an unanticipated pennant drive in 1955, the last serious midsummer pennant chase by the Red Sox before the 1967 "Impossible Dream" season. During a two-month stretch, he hit safely in 51 of 61 games and finished the season with a .283 average, still good for top 20 in the league, finishing second in the Rookie of the Year balloting.

For Billy, the trade from the Giants to the Red Sox was fortuitous for another reason, as he found a home base for his family in Sarasota, Florida, the spring training camp of the Sox. After reportedly moving his family 32 times before landing with the Sox, he maintained a home in Sarasota for the next five decades. 

In February, 1956, he was awarded the first annual "Harry Agganis Memorial Award" by the Boston baseball writers as the Red Sox Rookie of the Year. Despite his stellar performance in 1955, he was bumped as regular shortstop in the 1956 season in favor of rookie phenom Don Buddin so Billy returned to third base and briefly platooned with rookie Frank Malzone. When the Sox shipped Malzone back to the minors, Billy was the regular third baseman for the 1956 season and hit a respectable .271 in 135 games.

With Buddin in the military for the 1957 season, Billy moved back to shortstop, beating out Billy Consolo, while Malzone took over at third base. The Red Sox were in third place for much of the summer, after winning 15 of 21 games prior to the All-Star break, but never seriously contended for the pennant. Billy injured his back making a throw to first base in a game in Chicago in July, and didn’t return as the regular shortstop until August, finishing the season with a .252 batting average.

Although he had earned a reputation as a scrappy ballplayer after three seasons with the Red Sox, his defensive struggles were his undoing. He committed 25 or more errors in each of his three seasons as a starting infielder for the Red Sox. 

Despite his take-no-prisoners approach to playing baseball, he was the odd man out in the 1958 Red Sox infield, as the returning Buddin and the incumbent Malzone had locks on the shortstop and third-base positions, respectively. Billy was used primarily as a pinch-hitter, where he was ineffective, garnering just six hits in 38 pinch-hit at-bats. Overall, he batted just .159 in 88 at-bats. In December 1958, the Red Sox traded him to Baltimore.

Early in the 1959 season at Baltimore, the Orioles sent Brooks Robinson back to the minor leagues. With Billy hitting just .237, the Orioles recalled Robinson in early July and Billy was moved to shortstop for the remainder of the season. 

In 1960, with Robinson at third base and rookie Ron Hansen installed at shortstop, Klaus converted to second base to keep a reserve spot on the Baltimore bench. He was sparingly used during the 1960 season. 

In December 1960, Baltimore left Billy exposed to the American League expansion draft, and he was selected by the new Washington Senators. He played in 1961 with the Senators, mostly at third base.

Just before the start of the 1962 season, the Senators sold him to the Philadelphia Phillies but they released him after the 1962 season, re-signing him in April 1963, when he played another 11 games before being released again in May. He spent the remainder of the 1963 baseball season playing in Japan for the Chunichi Dragons of the Japanese Central League and then retired.

In the first year of his post-baseball-playing life in 1964, he converted a winter painting job in Sarasota into a year-round endeavor, holding an interest in a paint store. 

Itching to get back into baseball after an entire year away from the game, he secured a job in, December 1964, with the Senators organization as a minor-league manager for York (Pennsylvania) in the Double-A Eastern League. York finished third in 1965, but last in both 1966 and 1967 and the 1967 York club was shut out 29 times, and no-hit four times. Billy wasn’t around for the finish of the season, as he was fired in late June.

He remained as a scout for Washington during the summer, and in the fall managed the club’s team in the Florida Instructional League. The Senators gave him another shot at managing a minor-league team in 1968, running its Salisbury, North Carolina, farm club in the Class A Western Carolinas League. 

Billy piloted Oakland’s Class A farm club in Lodi, California, in 1969, for half a season. He tried minor-league managing one more season, 1970, with Pittsburgh’s farm club in Salem, Virginia, in the Class A Carolina League. After the 1970 season, he permanently left behind his days with the bat and ball and picked up a paintbrush full time, becoming a painting contractor by operating the "Klaus Painting Company".

For two decades, Billy and his wife operated the Valle Peddler store, selling antiques and gifts to tourists traveling through the Blue Ridge Mountains and he also continued his painting business there.

Billy Klaus was inducted into the Lake County High School Sports Hall of Fame in 2001. He died on December 3, 2006, in Sarasota, Florida, at age 78.