Fred Kipp, one of the last 14 Brooklyn Dodgers, is coming to Iola and Piqua for the Yates Center Memorial Day Parade.
Kipp was born and raised in Piqua before heading to New York where he played in the Brooklyn Dodger organization from 1953 to 1957 before moving to Los Angeles.
With the passing of Tommy Lasorda in early 2021, only 13 players from the Brooklyn Dodgers are still living.
Kipp is the only one who also played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, so he has come to be known as the Last Yankee Dodger.
Kipp will visit with friends, watch the Memorial Day parade and tell baseball stories on the square from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Kipp played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, and has come to be known as the Last Yankee Dodger.
From 1946 to 1949, Kipp pitched for the Piqua town team as a teenager and fanned many batters from Yates Center, Burt, Neosho Falls and Rose. After starring on the Iola High School basketball team, he started pitching at Emporia State University — then Emporia Teachers College. After graduation, he went to play for the famous Brooklyn Dodger organization in 1953. Kipp worked his way up through the minor leagues and won Rookie of the Year in 1956 with the Montreal Royals in the AAA International League.
At the end of his minor league season, Kipp joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and pitched batting practice during one of the many World Series against the New York Yankees in the 1950s. Before he even got onto the mound in the regular season, he pitched to legendary teammates like Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges and Duke Snider.
The Dodgers were still the champions during that Subway Series and Fred watched the Yankees’ Don Larsen pitch the only perfect game in World Series history that fall. 
He said he never felt so much tension in the air as in the ninth inning of that game. The Brooklyn Dodgers went on to lose that subway series for the sixth and last time.
The day after that loss, the Dodgers headed to Japan for a 19-game Goodwill Tour.
After a long season and losing another heartbreaking series, the Dodger manager Walter Alston decided to give Kipp a chance to pitch against the Japanese. The Japanese had never hit a knuckleball, so that is what Kipp used to confuse them. Kipp impressed the skipper and went on to pitch more innings than any other Dodger pitcher in Japan.
The papers said that the Dodgers had found their new southpaw in Japan.
The papers wrote a lot about how the Dodgers needed a lefty. Of the starting pitchers in 1956, Sandy Koufax was the only portsider and he had a losing record of 2-4 that year. It would be another five years before Sandy found his groove and became an All-Star of Cooperstown proportions. Kipp looked like he could fill that open position and things looked good in spring training in 1957. He made the final cut and started the season with the Dodgers, but never made it onto the field before being sent back to Montreal for the season.
CHANGE was in the air and the season didn’t go well for the Dodgers, or for Kipp.
