49

Liverpool Larrupers second baseman John Powers before the 1954 Halifax and Distrcit League final.
1954

50

While fans in Nova Scotia followed Drabowsky's successes closely, his departure effectively scuttled the Bearcats' hopes of a league championship. The pitching fortunes of the club now rested on the squarely on the shoulders of Yale University's Ken MacKenzie, as well eventual All-American Bobby Wedin and Charles Symeon. Not that they were chopped liver! The bespectacled MacKenzie, who hailed from Gore Bay Ontario, finished with a 10-4 won-lost record on the season, and signed at the end of the season with the Milwaukee Braves. The Braves assigned him to Double-A Atlanta in 1957, where he finished 14 and 6 with a 3.26 era. MacKenzie broke into the big leagues with Milwaukee in 1960 before joining Casey Stengel and the inept New York Mets in 1961. On one trip to the mound, Stengel handed him the ball and advised him not to worry and to "just think you are pitching against them Harvards". Symeon and Wedin would later go on respectively to play AAA and AA ball.
Even without Drabowsky the Bearcats made it to the finals of the league championship. In the semi-final round they defeated Stellarton in seven games. Wedin won three games. In the final, however, the Bearcats met the Dartmouth Arrows who had handily defeated Lew Krausse and the Halifax Citadels in the other semi-final. With the venerable Art Hoch at the rudder, and sporting a lineup dominated by southerners Harry Lloyd, Don Hafer, Mike Ricigliano and Jim Raugh, the Arrows knocked the Bearcats off in six games.
In many ways the 1956 season marked the end of an era in the H&D League. For the next three years the league operated with four franchises rather than six, and became a circuit dominated by college prospects, similar to the present-day Cape Cod League. Before the 1957 began the financially-strapped Larrupers withdrew from the league, as did the Halifax Citadels. The Stellarton Albions, the most successful franchise at the beginning of the decade, would continue to operate for a couple of more seasons, but eventually threw in the towel as well. As the 1957 season began, therefore, the league truly entered its final innings.