These dots were widely scattered – as with many Black ballplayers in his day, Bankhead’s career was multinational. He starred in Puerto Rico, made detours to the Dominican Republic and Canada, and then knocked around Mexico well into his 40s. Always a respectable hitter, Bankhead played the field abroad in addition to pitching. Outside the US, he was also a coach and manager.

Though Bankhead was clearly talented – he drew Bob Feller comparisons – he was hindered by control problems and an old injury. Authors Larry Moffi and Jonathan Kronstadt also pinpointed a crucial problem: “Like many of baseball’s first Black players, he was thrown into white baseball with the physical tools to succeed but little or no emotional support.”1 Jackie Robinson was Bankhead’s roommate when the pitcher first joined the Dodgers, four months after Robinson broke the color barrier. In his biography of Robinson, Arnold Rampersad said it bluntly: “Some observers, including Blacks, thought that [Bankhead] choked in facing white hitters.”2

Negro Leagues star and raconteur Buck O’Neil offered a more nuanced view. Author Joe Posnanski was there for a conversation between Buck and Satchel Paige’s son Robert:

“See, here’s what I always heard. Dan was scared to death that he was going to hit a white boy with a pitch. He thought there might be some sort of riot if he did it. Dan was from Alabama just like your father. But Satchel became a man of the world. Dan was always from Alabama, you know what I mean? He heard all those people calling him names, making those threats, and he was scared. He’d seen Black men get lynched.”3

Also, while Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber described Bankhead as “a quiet, pleasant man,”4 there were other sides of his personality. Sometimes he simply did not act in his own best interest – he lost two jobs abroad under a cloud. His brothers Sam and Garnett Bankhead both died by gunshot following quarrels (aged 70 and 63, no less); Dan too had a temper, which a weakness for women allegedly provoked. His family life was at times tumultuous. Yet as he battled illness and lived hand to mouth in his final years, this man attained peace.

Daniel Robert Bankhead was born on May 3, 1920, in Empire, Alabama. His parents, Garnett Bankhead Sr. and Arie (née Armstrong), had five boys and two girls who lived to adulthood. His given name appears as simply Dan in his military records, in the Social Security system, and on his gravestone. His son William F. Bankhead believed that his father shortened it at some point.

The town of Empire is a little more than 30 miles northwest of Alabama’s largest city, Birmingham. It is in the coal country that fueled Birmingham’s steel industry. Garnett Sr., who had worked for a lumber company around the time of World War I, labored in coal. The 1920 census shows him on the crew of a coal tipple (or loading facility); the 1930 census lists him as a miner. The sawmills, lumber yards, and mines were all hard and dangerous jobs – but they offered steady pay and a step up from sharecropping for many African Americans. The shadow of Jim Crow then loomed over the Deep South.

Garnett also played baseball. Although the source of the anecdote is not clear, Moffi and Kronstadt wrote that “he was a star first baseman in the Cotton Belt League until the day he saw a man die after being hit by a flying bat.”5

Dan was the third of the five ballplaying Bankhead brothers. The eldest, Sam, was a top-notch Negro Leaguer: a speedy, versatile, good-hitting infielder-outfielder from 1930 through 1950. A hardnosed leader on the field, Sam became a manager late in his career. While still playing shortstop, he was skipper of the Vargas Sabios (Wise Men), champion of the Venezuelan winter league in 1946-47. Sam then led the Homestead Grays during their last two years as an independent club (1949-50). He also managed Farnham in Canada’s Provincial League in 1951 and is recognized as the first Black skipper of a predominantly white team. Negro Leagues author John Holway contended that Sam inspired Troy Maxson, the lead character in August Wilson’s award-winning play Fences.

The second brother, Fred, was an infielder from 1936 through 1948. Joe and Garnett Jr. were both pitchers. Joe was with the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948, while Garnett pitched briefly with the Memphis Red Sox in 1947 and spent some time with the Homestead Grays in 1948 and 1949. (Another brother, James, born roughly two years before Dan, apparently died young. He appeared in the 1920 census but not in 1930.)

Bankhead attended public schools in Birmingham. In 1940, he became a pro ballplayer with the Black Barons. In a talk with author Brent Kelley, William “Jimmy” Barnes, another young local player who went to the Negro Leagues, recalled how it happened (though his memory was slightly off on the year and the team that signed Bankhead). “I just tried out for a little city league team. Dan Bankhead and I were trying out for third base and we were throwing the ball across the infield so hard.”6

Kelley also heard from another of Bankhead’s contemporaries, Barons infielder Ulysses Redd. “We went to spring training and had a bunch of guys out there – a bunch of shortstops anyway. . . .even Dan Bankhead wanted to be a shortstop at that time, but he was throwin’ so hard they said they would make a pitcher outta him. They did the right thing.”7 Seamheads.com shows a pitching record of 4-1 for Bankhead in 1940 and 7-1 the next year. He pitched two scoreless innings in the East-West All-Star Game, on July 27, 1941.

In the winter of 1941-42, Bankhead went to play ball in Puerto Rico for the first time. The Puerto Rican Winter League was in its fourth season, and a host of great Negro Leaguers were there, most notably Josh Gibson (Santurce) and Willard Brown (Humacao-Arecibo). Sam Bankhead was with Ponce, but Dan was a member of the Mayagüez Indios, who also featured Willie Wells and Buster Clarkson. He won 7 and lost 8.

Returning to the Black Barons in 1942, Bankhead posted a known record of 2-1. After that, though, the young man decided to serve his nation amid World War II. On April 22, 1943, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in Macon, Georgia. He was stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The Montford Point Marines, as they were also known, were not a combat unit. Even so, the all-Black troops became historically significant as an important step toward the integration of American military forces. Bankhead was part of the Montford Point baseball team, which remained in the States for the duration of the war and toured as a “morale raiser.” In addition to pitching, he played shortstop and the outfield.8

The Marine got occasional leave to pitch for the Black Barons, appearing at least once in 1943 and twice in 1944. On June 5, 1944, the New York Times reported that Bankhead struck out 17 New York Black Yankees as he fired a three-hit shutout in the nightcap of a doubleheader. In the opener, the Barons blanked the Philadelphia Stars 9-0. The twin bill took place at Yankee Stadium before an estimated crowd of 12,000.9

Bankhead, who had gained sergeant’s rank, was released from the service on June 7, 1946. He re-entered baseball with the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League. He once again made the roster for the East-West All-Star Game – in fact, a pair of them were held that year. He started the first game, on August 15, allowing two earned runs in three innings with no decision. Three days later, he got the win for the West with three scoreless innings.

According to The Complete Book of Baseball’s Negro Leagues, Bankhead finished the year with a 7-3 record, far outshining his 24-36 team. His 42 strikeouts led the league, though this seemingly low number, like his won-lost records, likely reflects patchy data (Seamheads shows even lower totals).

Sometime in the mid-1940s (the exact date remains under investigation), Bankhead got married to Linda Marquette, who had gone to school in Kansas City and also attended the Chicago Conservatory of Music. According to his son William, they met while she was performing as a jazz singer. The couple had a daughter named Waillulliah, or Lulu for short. The young girl’s name was patterned after famous actress Tallulah Bankhead – a member of a prominent Alabama family. Tallulah may have been linked to the Black Bankheads, because her great-grandfather owned slaves in Lamar County, about 80 miles west of Empire.

William Bankhead came to believe that Lulu was actually a foster child, and there is reason to believe him. A 1947 article in the Richmond Afro-American noted that the young girl was nine years old and that her parents had been married for 10 years.10 But that means Dan and Linda would have been about 17 and 15, respectively, upon their wedding. This is at odds with the evidence and suggests a vague effort at propriety in the article.

With Linda and Lulu in tow11, Bankhead returned to Puerto Rico in the winter of 1946-47. Pitching for the Caguas Criollos, he went 12-8 and led the league with 179 strikeouts. He also showed his speed on the basepaths with 12 steals.

Back with Memphis in 1947, Bankhead had the pleasure of playing with his brother Fred. That year was the first time that any of the Bankhead men were teammates; Garnett also appeared briefly with the Red Sox in ’47, possibly after Dan left. On July 27, Dan again got the win in the East-West All-Star Game, allowing one run in three innings at Comiskey Park. The West won, 5-2, before a crowd of 48,112.

Dodgers scouts George Sisler and Wid Matthews were aware, and they alerted their boss, Branch Rickey. Brooklyn was short on pitching – ironically, they had unloaded starter Kirby Higbe because he refused to play with Jackie Robinson – so Rickey again turned to the Negro Leagues. On August 22, as Rickey biographer Lee Lowenfish wrote, “he and Sisler then traveled to Memphis to observe Dan Bankhead. . . . After the game [in which he struck out 11 and lifted his record to 11-512], Bankhead and his wife fed the visitors dinner, and soon thereafter Rickey announced that the pitcher had been purchased from Blue Sox [sic] owner J.B. Martin for $15,000.”13

The Richmond Afro-American carried a picture of Dr. Martin’s brother B.B. (a co-owner and also a dentist) shaking hands with Linda Bankhead after the deal was announced. The slender, graceful woman (who was not African American) was noted as a former featured singer with jazz great Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra. She and Lulu – along with a dog named Tackie and a pet chicken named Fannie Chee-Chee – would join Bankhead in Brooklyn in early September. Linda said she was only a baseball fan when her husband was pitching.14

Lowenfish continued, “Rickey was happy that Dan Bankhead’s color did not attract overwhelming press attention when the pitcher arrived in Brooklyn. The executive always hoped for the day when merit, and not color of skin, determined a person’s chance for success.”15 However, author Jules Tygiel differed, writing that “[Bankhead] received a terrific workout from photographers and newshounds.”16

Rickey would have preferred to test his new pitcher in the minors first, but he needed a live arm more. The 27-year-old’s NL debut came at Ebbets Field on August 26. One news story estimated that Black fans made up roughly a third of that day’s crowd of 24,069.17. A very nervous Bankhead entered in the second inning in relief of Hal Gregg.

The new Dodger allowed eight runs (all earned) on 10 hits in his 3⅓ innings of work that day. In one of his well-honed turns of phrase, sportswriter Red Smith wrote, “(T)he Pirates launched Bankhead by breaking a Louisville Slugger over his prow.”18 However, the hurler displayed his all-around ability by homering off Pittsburgh’s Fritz Ostermueller in his first NL at-bat.

After the game, Bankhead told pioneer Black sportswriter Sam Lacy, “I think I’ll be okay as soon as this newness wears off. Today it seemed like I was wearing a new glove, new shoes, new hat, everything seemed tight.”19

Dodgers manager Burt Shotton mixed praise (“speed, a good curve, and control”) and criticism (“the boys were calling all his pitches”) in his post-game remarks. He said he “wanted another look before I form an opinion one way or another.”20 Bankhead pitched just three times more over the remainder of the season, though, with no decisions and a 7.20 ERA in 10 innings overall. Nonetheless, he remained on the Dodgers roster for the World Series. He made one appearance as a pinch-runner in Game Six. Bobby Bragan had doubled off the Yankees’ Joe Page to score Carl Furillo and put the Dodgers up 6-5. The future big-league manager recalled what happened next:

“Bankhead would have scored from second a few pitches later when Eddie Stanky singled to right but Dan fell down rounding third and just scrambled back to the bag in time. When Pee Wee Reese singled to center both Dan and Eddie scored to ice the game.”21 (Not quite – it took Al Gionfriddo’s famous catch off Joe DiMaggio to hold the lead.)

In the spring of 1948, the Dodgers trained in the Dominican Republic. It marked the first time that Black and white ballplayers stayed at the same hotel. This was a refreshing experience for Jackie Robinson and Bankhead, not only because of the good treatment at the classy Hotel Jaragua but also thanks to the fans. Robinson said, “They show it every time Dan Bankhead or I walk on the field by cheering and clapping as enthusiastically as if we were one of their native players.”22

News service stories from what was then Ciudad Trujillo stated that Bankhead “was converted into a gardener [outfielder] because of his batting power and speed afoot.”23 The experiment was abandoned, though – the Dodgers assigned Bankhead to their Class B affiliate in Nashua, New Hampshire, and he concentrated on pitching. On July 25, he fired a seven-inning no-hitter against the Springfield Cubs. He blazed his way to a 20-6, 2.35 record with a league-leading 243 strikeouts. His wins also led the New England League, and he barely missed the Triple Crown of pitching, with his ERA behind only Harry Schaeffer’s 2.33.

On August 22, newspapers reported Bankhead’s promotion to St. Paul, the Dodgers’ Triple-A affiliate in the American Association. Two days later, Lula Garrett of the Baltimore Afro-American wrote, “Satchel Paige opines that Dan Bankhead, youngest [sic] member of the Bankhead Baseball Brothers, throws a faster ball than Cleveland’s Bobby Feller.”24 He finished the season in good form, going 4-0 for the Saints with a 3.60 ERA.

Bankhead rejoined Caguas that winter, posting a 9-8 record. In 1949, he was assigned to Brooklyn’s other Triple-A team, the Montreal Royals. Again he won 20 and lost just six, while leading the league in strikeouts (176). Bankhead also led in walks with 170, though, earning the label “Wild Man of the International League.” The bases on balls were no doubt what pumped his ERA up to 3.76. In addition, he batted .323 with a homer and 26 RBIs.

The third-place Royals swept Rochester in the first round of the playoffs and then took four of five from Buffalo to become IL champs. Bankhead won the opener against the Red Wings and the clincher against the Bisons. Despite a sore arm, he added another win in the Little World Series, which the American Association champ, Indianapolis, won, four games to two.

In the winter of 1949-50, after barnstorming in the Southwest with a group of Black players led by Luke Easter, Bankhead was back in Puerto Rico again. He led the Puerto Rican Winter League in strikeouts for the second time, with 131. In addition to his 10-8 record, he hit seven homers. Caguas won the league championship and thus represented Puerto Rico in the second Caribbean Series, which was played in February at Sixto Escobar Stadium in San Juan.

In the second game of the four-team round robin, Bankhead faced ageless veteran Conrado Marrero, the ace of heavily favored Cuba’s staff. Puerto Rico gave Bankhead one run in the second inning, but that was all he needed as he threw a shutout. However, he lost two games to the eventual champion, Panama, including the tiebreaker.

Before the 1950 season opened, Bankhead was the subject of an uncomplimentary story quoting Branch Rickey. Allegedly the Mahatma turned down “a flattering offer from the Braves for the big right-hander. He confidentially told [Boston co-owner] Lou Perini that Bankhead wouldn’t help the Boston club.”25 The Bankhead-to-Boston rumor had been swirling since the prior fall; Rickey had also offered to deal the pitcher that winter to the White Sox.

Still, Bankhead won a job with Brooklyn that spring. He proceeded to get all nine of his NL wins with the Dodgers. His first came in relief of Don Newcombe at the Polo Grounds on April 28. Bankhead took his first four decisions, going all the way versus the Cubs at Ebbets Field on May 24. On June 18, he shut out the Cardinals on six hits at home.

Just when Bankhead looked to be settling in as an important member of the rotation, though, arm problems worsened. On July 8, the New York Times reported, “Dan Bankhead’s trouble is serious and may call for surgery. The Negro has considerable calcification in his shoulder.”26 The shoulder had pained him earlier that season too. He had complained of soreness in his first start on May 4. The root cause was apparently a dislocation suffered at the age of 17.27

Bankhead’s last start that year came on July 31, but he continued to work frequently out of the bullpen. He finished the year with a record of 9-4, 5.50, starting 12 times in 41 appearances. Control was a problem, as he walked 88 in 129⅓ innings.

In the winter of 1950-51, the Bankheads were in the Dominican Republic, where they welcomed son William that March. William stated that Bankhead was playing with the Escogido Leones, one of the four long-running Dominican clubs, a year before professional ball resumed in the country.

Bankhead’s arm really ailed him in 1951. He pitched a total of just 14 innings in seven games for the Dodgers (0-1, 15.43). In his last two appearances, he was shelled for 14 runs and 16 hits in seven innings. On July 24, Brooklyn announced that it had sold his contract to Montreal and brought up Clem Labine from St. Paul to replace him. Bankhead never made it back to the majors. Perhaps his most lasting big-league moment came amid a clubhouse debate, as he imparted a piece of down-home wisdom to his one-time roommate. “Not only are you wrong, Robinson,” said Bankhead, “You are loud wrong.”28

The pitcher offered another reason for his performance in Brooklyn – “financial pressure brought on by an inability to find an apartment that would accept children. He and his family stayed at an expensive hotel suite, which ate up most of his salary. ‘Nobody with an apartment would let me bring in my kids,’ he said. ‘Nobody wanted them. But I did.’”29

Things were not a whole lot better with the Royals. It took Bankhead over a month to pick up his first win in the International League, and he finished at 2-6, 3.91, mainly in relief. He saw some action out of the pen in the playoffs – Montreal again won the pennant – plus two more brief outings as the Milwaukee Brewers took the Little World Series in six games.

Bankhead resumed his Puerto Rican career in 1951-52 with a new club, the Santurce Cangrejeros (Crabbers). His record was 7-1, with a 3.71 ERA – although he had just 40 strikeouts in 70 innings, showing that he was no longer getting batters out with heat. Still, he was “unbeatable down the stretch” as the Crabbers won 16 of their last 20 games to make the playoffs before losing the finals to San Juan.30

Bankhead returned to Montreal for the 1952 season. However, the Dodgers organization released him in July, with a record of 0-1, 6.92. “Plagued with arm trouble, he worked only 13 innings in five games this season.”31 Bankhead then went back to Escogido – the Dominican baseball season was held in the summer from 1951 through 1954 – but he did not last long there.

In August, he had been named the club’s manager, replacing Félix “Fellé” Delgado, who had gone to the US to scout talent. Against the Estrellas Elefantes, Bankhead was trying for his first win against three losses when an aggressive baserunning play backfired. The third baseman had thrown a live ball to the ground arguing with the umpire, who had called Bankhead safe at third. Bankhead broke for the plate, slid in hard, but was out.

“[Catcher Zoilo] Rosario, fuming . . . immediately fired the ball at the Negro pitcher as he headed towards the Lions’ bench, but his aim was inaccurate and he missed. However, Bankhead quickly whirled around, picked up the catcher’s mask and hit Rosario over the head with it, opening a gash that required three stitches. In the free-for-all that followed, Bankhead was knocked out cold. After peace was restored, Rosario and Bankhead were fined and jailed.”32

Later that month, Bankhead was fired for “breaking training, fraternizing with players of another team and failing to show up for practice,” according to club president Paco Martínez Alba (Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s brother-in-law). Perhaps a more telling factor was that “the club had been having financial squabbles” with Bankhead.33 This man was always known as a tough negotiator, going back to his Negro League days.

In 1953, Bankhead played for Drummondville in the Canadian Provincial League. Quite a few Black ballplayers were in this league, including (though briefly) Bankhead’s younger brother Garnett. A few big-leaguers were there too, including player-manager Al Gionfriddo, Bankhead’s teammate on the ’47 Dodgers and with Montreal in ’49 and ‘’51. (Gionfriddo’s distinct memory of Bankhead was the way he used to “stamp the hell out of the rubber when he pitched.”34) With the last-place Royals, Bankhead’s batting line was .275-3-28; he pitched a handful of games at most (0-0, 0.00).

Late that July, Drummondville dumped veterans whose salaries were too high for the team’s modest budget.35 Bankhead went to Mexico, where he would spend nearly all of his remaining 13 years in the game. He served mainly in the field for the Monterrey Sultanes (.281-3-12) in 1953, though he also went 1-0, 2.90 in two games as a pitcher, including a complete game.

In the winter of 1953-54, Bankhead played in Mexico’s Liga de la Costa del Pacífico, which was entering its ninth season. His team was the Jalisco Charros, also known by the state’s capital, Guadalajara. Bankhead batted .335 as the first baseman and went 7-5 on the mound. He was named to the All-Star team for the league’s Southern division; that game took place on January 13, 1954. Joining him was Charros catcher Sam Hairston, patriarch of a three-generation big-league family.36

Bankhead stayed in Monterrey for the 1954 season (.273-7-33/2-2, 5.56 in seven pitching appearances). In 1955, the Mexican League entered Organized Baseball at the Double-A level. Bankhead split the season between the Sultanes and Veracruz Águila (combined totals: .316-9-46/0-1, 9.00). In 1956, he again played with two teams, Veracruz and the Mexico City Tigres (combined totals: .288-4-28/1-0, 3.00 in just 6 innings pitched).

In 1957, Bankhead took a step down to the Class C Central Mexican League. With the Aguascalientes Tigres, whose roster also included future Duke University athletic director Tom Butters, he batted .361 with 4 homers and 52 RBIs. He also went 2-2, 6.30 on the mound; Estadio Alberto Romo Chávez was and is a hitter’s ballpark. Butters recalled that the air was thin – Aguascalientes is 6,184 feet above sea level.

There was a gap in Bankhead’s summer career in 1958. William Bankhead remembered seeing his father arrested in Brooklyn that year after a stormy domestic dispute. To the best of William’s knowledge, though, Bankhead and Linda (who died in 2007) never got divorced. Throughout the years in Mexico, “he used to come home and make pit stops.”

Bankhead resumed play that winter with the Puebla Pericos (Parrots) in Mexico’s Veracruz League. He turned up in assorted stories in The Sporting News; little head shots showed he was still a “name.” The Parrots were the league champion, with Bankhead playing first base and pitching. In the spring of 1959, he returned to Veracruz as a player-coach, which likely explains his limited action (.244-0-6/0-0, 0.00).

A relatively stable period of four summers in Puebla then followed; the Parrots franchise was by then in the Mexican League. Bankhead was largely a reserve and pinch-hitter as he entered his 40s. During this time, he appeared in 225 games but amassed only 358 at-bats, with a grand total of one homer and 34 RBIs. His average was .293, driven largely by his .378 mark in 1960 (31-for-82). As a pitcher, his composite record was 24-15, 4.60 – mainly in relief, as he started just six times and pitched just 272 innings across 133 appearances.

In 1960 and 1961, Bankhead’s name occasionally popped up in the American papers, especially in San Antonio. During these two years, the Mexican League teams faced Texas League opponents regularly – 36 games and 24 games for each Mexican League club. The combined leagues were known as the Pan American Association. In August 1961, Bankhead won three games in two days in relief. That fall saw him with Saltillo in the little-known Northern Autumn League, which apparently lasted only one season despite drawing decent crowds thanks to pitchers like Luis Tiant.

Bankhead then wintered with another obscure Mexican circuit, the Bajío (Lowlands) League. He managed the Acámbaro Trains, a club in the state of Guanajuato. Bankhead must have inspired a following, for 100 fans traveled 500 miles to Puebla in August 1962 to cheer for him on Dan Bankhead Day in Puebla. The veteran pitched a complete game and won 13-1, as Alonzo Perry (another ex-Negro Leaguer, then 39) scored Monterrey’s only run on a wild pitch.37

To start the 1962 winter season, Bankhead was manager of Martínez de la Torre in the Veracruz League – but he was fired on November 14. The club was 6-4; there was only a cryptic report saying, “The Sugar Canes’ officials . . . took the action ‘for the good of the club.’”38 So then, after 10 seasons away, he resurfaced in Puerto Rico as a player-coach. He was 3-0 pitching for Caguas, winning both ends of a doubleheader in relief on December 2. A week later, Bankhead was named the club’s interim manager after Preston Gómez resigned on December 9.39 Within three days, though, the Criollos released him and made Jim Rivera manager. Bankhead then joined the Ponce Leones.40

William Bankhead went to the island that winter too. He had fond memories of how his father provided him with a white horse to ride. “I used to ride up into the hills there and shoot at iguanas with a Daisy BB gun,” he said. William recalled that Bankhead left the club after another domestic dispute with Linda. A Criollos teammate, pitcher Julio Navarro, said, “I can’t say whether it did or didn’t happen – I don’t remember anything like that. But he did a hell of a job pitching for an older guy. You tell me he was 42, I thought he was in his 50s.

“He was a good person, but I think he didn’t have much experience managing. Also, our team didn’t look like it had a chance to make the playoffs that year. Just before Christmas, some guys who aren’t from Puerto Rico want to go home, so teams will release them if they’re not winning. It’s also the last date to give them a chance to sign with somebody else.” However, the post-Bankhead Criollos won 24 of their last 32 games, surged from fifth place to second (out of six teams), and made it to the playoff finals.

After his last season with Puebla – he brought along a couple of Puerto Ricans he’d scouted41 – Bankhead moved to the Mexican Central League (Class A) in 1964. With the León Broncos, he put up a remarkable average of .441 with 4 homers and 41 RBIs, while still pitching capably (4-1, 4.20). He was listed as manager for part of that year, along with Cuban Santos Amaro, father of Rubén Amaro and grandfather of Ruben Amaro Jr.

In 1965, Bankhead remained as nonplaying manager of the León ballclub, which then became known as the Diablos Verdes (Green Devils). He led them to a second-place finish. At age 46 in 1966, Bankhead then enjoyed his last hurrah as a player with Reynosa. On June 2, the Broncos hired him away – as manager – from Aguascalientes in the Central League. In 11 games, he went 6-for-14, also posting his last pitching win on July 17. He was 1-0, 4.73 in 19 innings across six relief outings.

Bankhead’s time in baseball then came to an end. Like many men in this position, he really didn’t have another good career option – the game was his life. Much insight on the ensuing period came from Cornelius “Doc” Settles, whose mother, Martha Ann, and aunts Charlene and Essie grew up with Bankhead in Alabama. These good neighbors offered a helping hand.

“It would have been in the mid to late ’60s,” said Settles. “From what I understand, everything started to implode for Dan in Mexico.” William Bankhead stated, “He was pitching more than balls, you know what I mean? Too many kids, too many intimacies. There are several kids down in Mexico that I know of. And you can’t live in a foreign country without money.”

“The nearest oasis was Houston,” Settles continued. “My mom and her sisters weren’t looking for anything. This was just somebody close from home – there was a connection by marriage in there too.

“Dan was facing inner turmoil when he first came to Houston. He was trying to get back on his feet. But he stepped in right when I needed somebody in my life. He was so humble, and he had a down-home sensibility that grounded him. I was just a teenager, and he was always willing to share a few moments with me and my brothers tossing baseballs and playing games. I will never forget Dan Bankhead burning up my hand while trying to catch one of his pitches. Even in his final days Dan could still toss a mean fast ball.

“There’s a photo in Rachel Robinson’s book called An Intimate Portrait on page 92. Jackie is playing cards with Don Newcombe, Campy [Roy Campanella], and Dan. I remember firsthand that Dan also loved playing cards and checkers. He wouldn’t take any prisoners! He would beat us kids in games and laugh afterwards with that sparkle in his eyes and big smile.

“I only wish that I could have grasped who we were hanging out with. I would have done a better job of absorbing every little tidbit. Back then I was too naïve to understand. He would talk about Mexico and the league, how hot it was. He was so fluent in Spanish – he looked Hispanic. His pigmentation was light, and as he got older, he got even lighter. [Note: Garnett Bankhead was listed as a mulatto, as were his sons, in the 1920 census.

“There was a woman living in Mexico too. I just remember vaguely, I don’t remember her name or their child’s, but I met them. She was beautiful. Dan never went into detail about it, though.

“Dan spent his final years working for a small service company delivering food goods and supplies to small businesses and restaurants across Houston. I remember driving over and picking up Dan from his tiny rented apartment that was located upstairs over a garage in Kashmere Gardens, just 10 minutes from our house. He’d have a glove and ball, and he’d be smoking a Camel.”

At some point in the 1970s, Bankhead was diagnosed with lung cancer, and he was in and out of the Veterans Administration hospital in Houston. “His little smoking habit finally caught up with him,” said Doc Settles. “I always thought he’d go back to Mexico, but then he got sicker. You could see him erode. He’d have his ups and downs, but he knew. He just got more and more humble. He was resolved to make peace. Dan’s final days living in Houston were filled with reflection, days of happiness.” Eventually, he succumbed on May 2, 1976 – a day short of his 56th birthday.42

Thanks to the VA, the old Marine was buried under a modest bronze marker in Houston National Cemetery. “I don’t remember if any of his old teammates came to the funeral,” Settles said. “It was a small and quiet event. I don’t think he was in touch with them. It was in the past and he didn’t dwell on it.”

Bankhead’s name surfaced in 2006 in a dispute between his sons William and Dan Herbert Bankhead (born in 1949, later known as Dan Al-Mateen) over the pitcher’s memorabilia. William alleged that the items came into the possession of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum by improper means. A legal battle ensued.43

The less said of this episode, however, the better. It’s best to remember Dan Bankhead as a talented player, a pioneer, and for the goodness in him. William Bankhead remembered once coming to blows with his father, on the street in front of Linda’s residence in Brooklyn Heights. Yet later, before the younger man went to serve in Vietnam in 1971, Dan said “I am sorry,” giving his son a kiss. He bequeathed William the Smith & Wesson pistol he got upon enlisting in the Marines. William also remembered how his father taught him to love and respect animals, birds, and other children.

Doc Settles summed it up nicely too. “He had a personality you wanted to be around. He left you with positive things. I was able to enjoy his laughter and his jokes and his smiles. I just wish we knew more about what he went through as an African American baseball trailblazer.”

Acknowledgments

This biography was originally published in 2009. An abridged version was published in The Team That Forever Changed Baseball and America: The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). This updated version was published in 2024.

Special thanks for their memories to Doc Settles (e-mail exchanges and phone discussions starting in June 2008) and William F. Bankhead (e-mail exchanges and phone discussions starting in September 2008).

Continued thanks also to Julio Navarro (telephone interview, 2008) and SABR member Jorge Colón Delgado (additional Puerto Rican statistics).

Image credits

Dodgers headshot: courtesy of walteromalley.com

Marines headshot: courtesy of www.mpma28.com

Watercolor: courtesy of Doc Settles, Artist

Sources

Obituary: “Dan Bankhead, 54 [sic], Ex-Dodger, Is Dead.” New York Times, May 7, 1976: 95. Note that The Sporting News sometimes presented Bankhead’s year of birth as 1921.

Lloyd Johnson and Miles Wolff. The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball (Durham, North Carolina: Baseball America, Inc., 1997).

José A. Crescioni Benítez, El Béisbol Profesional Boricua (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Aurora Comunicación Integral, Inc., 1997).

Pedro Treto Cisneros, editor, Enciclopedia del Béisbol Mexicano (Mexico City, Mexico: Revistas Deportivas, S.A. de C.V., 1998).

James A. Riley, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1994).

John Holway, The Complete Book of Baseball’s Negro Leagues (Fern Park, Florida: Hastings House Publishers, 2001).

Larry Lester, Black Baseball’s National Showcase: The East-West All-Star Game, 1933-1953, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Professional Baseball Player Database V6.0

www.paperofrecord.com (various small pieces of information from The Sporting News and El Informador)

www.ancestry.com (census information on Garnett Bankhead)

www.findagrave.com

Social Security Death Index

Notes

1 Larry Moffi and Jonathan Kronstadt, Crossing the Line: Black Major Leaguers 1947-1959 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 13.

2 Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1997), 184.

3 Joe Posnanski, The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), 144.

4 Red Barber, 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1982), 280.

5 Moffi and Kronstadt, 11.

6 Brent Kelley, The Negro Leagues Revisited (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2000), 89.

7 Kelley, 118.

8 From the online history of the Montford Point Marines, webmaster James Stewart Jr.: http://www.mpma28.com/newsletters/newsletter/2854121/44177.htm

9 “Barons Win by 9-0, 13-0; Triumph Over the Philadelphia Stars and Black Yankees,” New York Times, June 5, 1944: 12.

10 “Wife, Daughter, Dog, Chicken Root for Dan,” Richmond Afro-American, September 6, 1947: 1.

11 Leslie Heaphy, The Negro Leagues, 1869-1960 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2002), 173. See also note 10.

12 Dave Bloom, “Beale Street’s Dancing Over Its Boy, Dan,” The Sporting News, September 3, 1947: 7. Seamheads shows a record of 2-1.

13 Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 433. Two notes: the won-lost record cited here and in The Sporting News conflicts with the 4-4 mark shown in The Complete Book of Baseball’s Negro Leagues. Also, Bankhead’s wife is referred to as “Charlotte.”

14 “Wife, Daughter, Dog, Chicken Root for Dan.”

15 Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 433.

16 Jules Tygiel, in Sport and the Color Line: Black Athletes and Race Relations in Twentieth Century America, editors Patrick Miller and David Wiggins (New York: Routledge, 2004), 184.

17 “Bucs Win; Bankhead Homers,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, August 27, 1947: 24.

18 Red Smith, “Views of Sport,” New York Herald-Tribune; date uncertain. Reprinted in Baltimore Afro-American, September 6, 1947: 13.

19 Sam Lacy, “Bankhead Knocked Out in First Dodger Game,” Richmond Afro-American, August 30, 1947: 14.

20 Joe Reichler (Associated Press), “Negro Hurler to Get New Chance,” August 27, 1947.

21 Bobby Bragan, “Bragan Recalls Series Hit,” Evening Standard (Uniontown, Pennsylvania), July 10, 1965: 7.

22 Michael E. Lomax, in Race and Sport: The Struggle for Equality On and Off the Field, ed. Charles K. Ross (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 66. Originally in New Jersey Afro American and Pittsburgh Courier, March 13, 1948.

23 Leo H. Petersen, “Youth, Speed and Fight To Mark 1948 Dodger Team,” Lima (Ohio) News, March 29, 1948: 11.

24 Bill James and Rob Neyer, The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (New York: Fireside, 2004), 125.

25 “Branch Rickey May Be Forced to Eat Words.” Syracuse Herald-American, March 19, 1950: D1.

26 Roscoe McGowen, “Simmons Checks Brooklyn, 7-2, Behind 4-Run Onslaught in Sixth,” New York Times, July 8, 1950.

27 Moffi and Kronstadt, 12.

28 Dave Anderson, “Nice Wrong Isn’t Really So Terrible,” New York Times, February 27, 1998.

29 Anderson, “Nice Wrong Isn’t Really So Terrible.”

30 Thomas E. Van Hyning, The Santurce Crabbers (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1999, 38.

31 Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette, July 20, 1952: 29.

32 Alejandro Martínez, “Dan Bankhead Fined, Jailed in Dominican Republic Riot,” The Sporting News, August 13, 1952: 30.

33 Alejandro Martínez, “Bankhead Fired as Manager in Dominican Loop,” The Sporting News, September 3, 1952: 32.

34 Peter Golenbock, Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers (New York: McGraw-Hill/Contemporary, 2000 edition), 157.

35 Scott Baillie, “Happy Once Again: Al Gionfriddo Now Playing for Ventura,” Daily Review (Hayward, California), May 20, 1954: 10.

36 Manuel de Jesús Sortillón Valenzuela, www.historiadehermosillo.com/BASEBALL/Menuff.htm (online history of Mexico’s Liga de la Costa del Pacífico). One may also find pictures of and stories about Bankhead and Sam Hairston in the Guadalajara newspaper El Informador.

37 “Bankhead Stars on Big Day,” The Sporting News, August 18, 1962: 39.

38 Roberto Hernández, “Bankhead Fired as Manager; Pinkston Fractures Arm,” The Sporting News, December 1, 1962: 41.

39 Miguel Frau, “Orsino Steps High as Candidate for Triple-Title King,” The Sporting News, December 22, 1962: 29.

40 Miguel Frau, “New Skipper Rivera Spurs Caguas to Winning Splurge,” The Sporting News, December 29, 1962: 33.

41 Roberto Hernández, “Season Opens First in Mexico; Sultans Favored to Repeat,” The Sporting News, April 13, 1963: 48.

42 “Bankhead Dies,” Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail, May 7, 1976: 29. Of interest in this story is a reference to a wife coming up from Mexico.

43 Charles Emerick, “Negro Leagues museum brought into family feud, lawsuit over memorabilia,” Daily Record (St. Louis, Missouri), October 3, 2006.

Brooklyn took an early 5–0 lead, but the Phillies rallied to tie the score at 7–7 after six innings. Banta, who had entered the game with two outs in the bottom of the sixth, shut down the Phillies the rest of the way, giving up only two hits and a walk. After the Dodgers took a 9-7 lead in the top of the tenth, Banta retired the Phillies in the bottom of the inning to seal the victory and give Brooklyn the NL flag.

Jackie Kay Banta was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, on June 24, 1925. He was the only son of Glen and Blanche (nee Hutsell) Banta. Glen, a barber by trade, later opened a popular billiards parlor in Hutchinson. Jack’s parents were dedicated baseball fans, and early on they instilled in him an appreciation and passion for the game. Jack pitched on the local Optimist baseball team on the sandlots of Hutchinson until he was seventeen. He graduated from Hutchinson High School (which had no baseball team) in 1943 and took a full-time warehouse job. The teenager tried to enlist in the military in World War II but a bad knee kept him out of the service.

Dodgers scout Burt Wells, who had seen Banta play in 1942, was driven by the war-induced player shortages to sign young talent. In 1944 Wells invited Banta to a tryout in Springfield, Missouri, where the Dodgers’ American Association affiliate St. Paul Saints were practicing.

 It did not take long for the six-feet-two-and-a-half-inch, 175-pound Banta to impress everyone at the Saints camp with his blazing fastball, and he was quickly signed. Brooklyn general manager Branch Rickey first assigned Banta to the Newport News (Virginia) team in the Class B Piedmont League. After he pitched in three games at Newport News, the Dodgers sent him to their Class D affiliate in Olean, New York.

Banta was Olean’s best pitcher (12-5, 3.10 ERA) and primary pinch hitter (21 hits and an overall .304 batting average). Late in the ’44 season he was promoted to the Montreal Royals of the International League. In fourteen games with the Royals, Banta went 1-4, giving him a 14-9 record with a 3.42 earned-run average with the three teams.  

Banta spent the entire 1945 season with the Royals, winning twelve games and losing nine, as Montreal finished first in the regular season but lost out in the finals of the Governors Cup playoffs. He also experienced shoulder trouble for the first time, but after a few weeks of rest was able to resume his place in the Royals’ rotation.

In August 1946, after winning nine games and losing six with Montreal, Banta was transferred to St. Paul. Montreal was cruising to the International League crown, while St. Paul was in the midst of a tight American Association pennant race. Jack won three games and lost two for the Saints, who also used him as a left-handed pinch hitter.    

Banta returned to Montreal in 1947 and from the outset of spring training he was “locked in” on the mound. “This should be the year for that boy to arrive,” Royals manager Clay Hopper told the press.1 In June, Banta, who pitched with a side-arm crossfire motion, hurled twenty-nine consecutive scoreless innings. Four days after the streak ended, he pitched a 4–0 shutout against Baltimore. During the streak, he allowed twenty hits, walked fourteen, and struck out forty-seven. After witnessing Banta’s whitewash of Baltimore, International League President Frank J. Shaughnessy estimated the hard-throwing twenty-two-year-old would easily bring $100,000 on the open market.

On June 11, 1947, in the midst of Banta’s scoreless streak, Dodgers pitcher Rube Melton was demoted to Montreal. Branch Rickey intended to call up Banta to replace Melton. However, manager Hopper balked at the exchange, telling Rickey that numerous doubleheaders loomed and he needed all of his pitchers. Rickey could have certainly pressed the issue but decided that Banta needed a bit more minor-league experience and let Hopper keep him.

Banta finished the season at 15-5 for the Royals, striking out 199 in 199 innings and leading the league with seven shutouts. His accomplishments earned him a September call-up to the Dodgers. Banta made his major-league debut on September 18, 1947, in an 8–7 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates. He pitched in two more games with Brooklyn before the season ended but was ineligible to play in the World Series against the Yankees that year.  

In 1948 Banta went to spring training with the Dodgers in the Dominican Republic. Once again he showed his dominant form, tossing a seven-inning no-hitter against Montreal and allowing just one run in twenty-seven innings of work in the Grapefruit League. Dodgers manager Leo Durocher said, “Banta can really fire that ball. If he continues to give us pitching like this I may not have any mound problems.”2

Banta earned a spot on the Dodgers’ roster, but after a relief appearance against the Giants and a losing start against the Braves he was optioned to Montreal. Banta spent the rest of the 1948 season with the Royals, tying Rochester’s Bill Reeder for the most wins in the league with nineteen. His 193 strikeouts also led the league. Banta continued to pitch well in the postseason, helping Montreal win the International League playoffs and the Junior World Series.  

Back with the Dodgers in 1949, Banta had his best year in the majors. Pitching mostly in relief, he won ten games—including the pennant-clincher—with a 3.37 ERA. Brooklyn again lost the World Series to the Yankees, this time in five games. Banta pitched in relief in three of the games, and his 3.18 earned run average was the lowest among Dodgers relief pitchers. He earned $6,000 in salary that season, plus $4,272.74 in World Series money.      

Banta reported to the Dodgers for spring training in Vero Beach in 1950 ready to pick up where he left off. But he injured his shoulder a few days after he arrived in camp. The injury was diagnosed as floating cartilage, the same problem he had encountered in 1945. He continued to pitch through the pain but his control suffered. After posting a 4-4 record with the Dodgers he was sent to Montreal, remaining there for the rest of the season. He was 4-7 with a 4.92 ERA in nineteen games, seventeen of them starts. He walked eighty-seven batters in ninety-seven innings.              

By the spring of 1951 Banta was still in considerable pain and began getting injections of novocaine in his shoulder. The novocaine eased the pain while he pitched, he told reporters, but after it wore off, “I can’t lift my arm.”  Speaking about his career-ending injury years later, Banta said, “In those days anything that was wrong with you was tendinitis. They never heard of a rotator cuff. They’d take an x-ray and if they didn’t find any bone chips they didn’t know what was wrong with you.”3

The Dodgers, puzzled by Banta’s injury, sent him to a dentist to have impacted wisdom teeth removed, hoping that would relieve the pain in his shoulder. After a few weeks in camp with the 1951 Dodgers, Banta was sent home to rest for a month. After that he joined the Fort Worth Cats, the Dodgers’ affiliate in the Class AA Texas League. Jack pitched only fourteen innings over seven games for the Cats without a decision.    

In 1952, with his shoulder still ailing, Banta joined the Dodgers Lancaster, Pennsylvania club in the Class B Interstate League as a player-coach. He made a few appearances at first base but did his best work on the mound as a relief pitcher. The former strikeout artist went 5-2 with a 3.98 earned-run average in twenty-eight appearances.

Banta retired as a player after that season. He had a brief stint as a scout for the Dodgers before taking a job as a manager in the Brooklyn farm system. He managed from 1953 through 1957 at the Class C and Class D levels, leading the Shawnee (Oklahoma) Hawks to a first-place finish in the Sooner State League in 1954.   With his involvement in Organized Baseball over, Banta, who was one season shy of qualifying for a major league pension, settled down to family life in Hutchinson with his wife, the former Jackie Gaylor, and their three children, Michael, Kristie, and Lee Ann. Jack married Jackie on February 1, 1949.

During his playing days, Banta had worked in the off-season as an accountant. In 1956 the Kansas native took a job with the Dillon Corporation, a supermarketchain based in Hutchinson. He spent thirty-four years with the company. Jack was an avid golfer, who consistently shot par or under, and a great pool player. He also enjoyed hunting and fishing.

In 2004 Banta was inducted into the Kansas Baseball Hall of Fame. This accolade had been offered to him earlier but he had always declined the honor. Finally, he relented and accepted; his health was failing at the time and he was unable to attend the installation ceremony.

In his later years, Banta suffered with cardiovascular problems, and he died on September 17, 2006, at the age of eighty-one. He was survived by his wife, Jackie, their three children, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Jack Banta is buried in Hutchinson’s Penwell-Gabel Cemetery.

Sources

Hutchinson (Kansas) News, July 11, 2003, and August 14, 1994.

Reno County New Times, Hutchinson, Kansas, October, 15, 1997.

Telephone interview on July 22, 2010, with Kristie Banta Empey (daughter)  

Telephone interview on July 22, 2010, with Jackie Banta (wife)    

Telephone interview on July 25, 2010, with Harold Dunsworth (cousin)

Telephone interview on July 28, 2010, with Mike Banta (son)

Telephone interview on July 28, 2010, with Jim Jolly, former minor-league player, manager, team executive, and family friend.

Telephone conversation between Tom Bourke and Banta’s daughter, Kristie Banta (September 17, 2010).

A special thank you from the author to Jack Banta’s daughter Kristie Banta Empey, who generously assisted me with family information, research, and overall support during the writing of this biography. In addition, she put me in touch with her mother, brother, cousin, and Mr. Jolly. I sincerely appreciate all of her help and kindness.

Photo credit

Jack Banta, Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Sporting News, July 2, 1947.

2 Sporting News, April 14, 1948.

3 Hutchinson (Kansas) News, August 14, 1994.

Walter Lanier “Red” Barber—Red for the color of his hair—was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on February 17, 1908. Seventy years later he was one of the first two broadcasters honored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame, along with his rival and sometime partner Mel Allen. Curt Smith, who chronicled the history of baseball broadcasting in two books, wrote in The Storytellers, “The Ol’ Redhead was white wine, crepes Suzette and bluegrass music; Mel, beer, hot dogs and the United States Marine Band.” 

Red’s father, William Lanier Barber, was a locomotive engineer from Brown’s Creek, North Carolina. His mother, Selena Martin, was an English teacher and school principal from an old Mississippi family. She insisted that her children practice what she taught. “My mother gave me an ear for language. . . . She gave me my interest in religion, too,” he wrote. “My father didn’t have the education my mother did, but he was a wonderful raconteur, a natural storyteller. He’d sit out on the front porch and tell stories by the hour.” The Barbers later had a second son, William Martin, and a daughter, Effie Virginia. 

The Barbers moved to Sanford, Florida, near Orlando, when Walter was ten years old. He was a high school football halfback and kicker at five feet eight and 165 pounds. He graduated first in his class and was rewarded with a $20 gold piece. His first ambition was to be an end-man (the lead comedian) in a minstrel show, and he performed in blackface during high school and college. While he was working his way through the University of Florida as a waiter and boarding-house manager, one of his housemates, Ralph Fulghum, asked him to read a research paper on the university radio station. As Red put it, “Then came the great turning point of my life. I know that Satan took Christ up on a mountain and showed him the world and said, ‘If you bow down to me I’ll give it all to you.’ Christ wasn’t tempted, but I was. Fulghum tempted me out of all proportion. He said, ‘If you come out and read this paper I’ll buy you dinner tonight.’” Barber made his radio debut reading a paper on “Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstetrics.”

That led to a job with the station, WRUF, and to his first sports assignment: Florida’s opening football game in 1930. He called his debut “undoubtedly the worst broadcast ever perpetrated on an innocent and unsuspecting radio audience.” He was so bad that he was pulled off the air and other announcers tried their hands at the next two games. During those weeks, Barber began attending football practice and picking the brains of an assistant coach. He learned how to prepare for a broadcast. He talked his boss into giving him another chance, and the sportscaster’s career began.

Barber encountered the other passion of his life in Gainesville: Lylah Murray Scarborough, a nurse who treated him when he was taken into the infirmary one night after an accident. They were married in 1931. On September 17, 1937, Red and Lylah’s daughter, Sarah, was born. Sarah, their only child, later became a professor of English.

Ambitious for a better job, Red took time off from WRUF and rode buses to Atlanta, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Chicago for auditions, but stations were not hiring during the Depression. In 1934 the Cincinnati Reds’ new general manager, Larry MacPhail, persuaded owner Powel Crosley Jr. to put the team’s games on the air. An executive at WLW, a station owned by Crosley, remembered the young man from Florida, and hired him as the club’s first play-by-play announcer at $25 a week, less than he was paid in Gainesville. On Opening Day he broadcast the first major-league game he had ever seen. “That was the most joyous day of my life, next to my wedding day,” he remembered.

In 1935 Red called the first of thirteen World Series, over the Mutual network. What he remembered most vividly was the pregame briefing by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Judge Landis summoned the announcers from all the networks (there were no exclusive rights deals then) and in his customary Sermon-on-the-Mount style, lectured them, “Don’t editorialize. Report.” Landis’s admonition was prompted by Ted Husing’s 1934 Series broadcasts, when Husing criticized the umpires. Husing was banned from the Series forever after.

Many of Barber’s successors in the booth have called him the first reporter to broadcast baseball. “I’ve heard tapes of Red Barber in the 1930s and ’40s,” Bob Costas told the Los Angeles Times, “where he tells you there’s a line single to left-center and he tells you how many times it bounced before the center fielder picked it up. You needed that then. Today, even the very good announcers will very rarely describe a guy’s stance or the peculiarities of a guy’s windup, because they’ve been subconsciously influenced by television even though they’re on the radio.” 

Allan Barra, in the online magazine Salon, described listening to tapes of Barber’s broadcasts: “There were no complex statistics, no hype, and, of course, no visuals. Just poetry. When the wind was blowing the flag. A description of how the fielders were set. An anecdote or two about each player. With nothing to work with but words, Barber painted a picture of the game that kick-started my own imagination in a way that technology never could.”

Barber’s best-known innovation for broadcasters was a simple device to remind him to repeat the score frequently for listeners who had just tuned in: He kept a three-minute egg timer, an hourglass, on his desk in the booth. Every time the sand ran down, he repeated the score and flipped his timer over. Dozens if not hundreds of later announcers adopted this prop.

An important part of the early play-by-play man’s job was the re-creation of out-of-town games. Broadcasters didn’t begin traveling with teams until after World War II. The announcer in a studio hundreds of miles from the ballpark used Western Union’s telegraphic pitch-by-pitch accounts to simulate a live broadcast. Most broadcasters tried to make the re-creation seem as realistic as possible: using sound effects of recorded crowd noise, cranking up the volume for an exciting play; two pieces of wood banged together to simulate the crack of the bat; recorded organ music. “My reaction was just the opposite. I wanted the audience to know at all times that I was doing a re-creation,” Barber said in a 1985 appearance on KCMO radio in Kansas City, Missouri. He used no sound effects and placed his microphone close to the telegraph key, so listeners heard the beeps of Morse code.

“You did that broadcast from a series of mental pictures,” Barber said. “I made it my business to mentally photograph every player—how he looked, how big he was. . . . I memorized the idiosyncrasies, the habits. . . . I memorized how each pitcher pitched. So as I stood in the studio I saw the game.”

When Larry MacPhail left Cincinnati for Brooklyn in 1939, he took Barber with him to the nation’s media capital. Red brought the down-home idiom of his Southern roots to the borough whose residents were ridiculed for speaking of “dem” and “dose.” Many people who lived in Brooklyn in the 1940s have insisted that they could walk down any street in the borough and never miss a pitch, because Barber’s voice was wafting out of every window and every passing car. During World War II, he became a civic institution as chairman of Brooklyn’s Red Cross blood drive and host of radio War Bonds sales. 

New York offered Barber unmatched opportunities. According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he called the first National Football League championship game to be broadcast nationwide, in 1940, when the Chicago Bears buried the Washington Redskins, 73-0. He regularly broadcast football games of the professional Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, as well as Princeton University. He also hosted entertainment programs with bandleaders Sammy Kaye and Woody Herman and singers Lena Horne and Mario Lanza. For nine years after World War II, he was the director of sports for CBS, where he first heard Fordham University student Vince Scully.

During the war, Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey was signing as many promising young players as his scouts could find, laying the groundwork for a decade of success. He was also laying the groundwork for an even more important move. Months before he signed Jackie Robinson, Rickey confided his plan to Barber. Red said he was the first one outside Rickey’s family to hear that Rickey intended to break organized baseball’s sixty-year-old color line: “I believe he told me about it so far in advance so that I could have time to wrestle with the problem, live with it, solve it.”

Barber never admitted any racist feelings. In his history of Robinson’s rookie year, 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball, he declared, “I was not a racist.” He wrote in his autobiography, “The Negroes who came and went through our lives were always treated with the utmost respect and with a great deal of warmth and a great deal of affection.” At the same time, he acknowledged, “[T]here was a line drawn, and that was that.” Southerners of Barber’s generation never encountered a black person in a situation of social or economic equality until they reached middle age. That was that.

After Rickey’s revelation, Barber told Lylah, “I’m going to quit.” She suggested they have a martini and sleep on it. His wife’s cooler head prevailed, but Barber said, “It really tortured me.” Eventually he concluded, “[A]ll I had to do when he came was treat him as a fellow man, treat him as a ballplayer, broadcast the ball.” In his 1991 interview with Bob Costas, Barber recalled, “I don’t think I ever said he was a Negro. I didn’t have to. Everybody knew who he was.” He also owned up to his self-interest: “Economics has a way of being the hidden persuader. I valued the job at Brooklyn.”

The rookie Robinson led the Dodgers to the 1947 World Series. That classic included two of Barber’s most famous games. In Game Four, Yankees right-hander Bill Bevens took a no-hitter into the ninth inning, while walking ten. Brooklyn pinch-hitter Cookie Lavagetto came to bat with the Dodgers trailing by one run and two runners on base: “Two men out, last of the ninth. The pitch. Swung on. There’s a drive hit out toward the right-field corner. Henrich going back. He can’t get it. It’s off the wall for a base hit. Here comes the tying run— and—here’s—the winning run.” 

On National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” on April 23, 1982, Barb er told host Bob Edwards, “When all of the excitement was over for a little bit, I just sort of caught my breath and without thinking about it, Bob, I said, ‘Well, I’ll be a suck-egg mule.’ ”

Edwards asked why he said that. Barber replied, “When you’re doing something such as you and I are doing, live radio without any preparation, no script, you are just concentrating on your work and something just comes out. . . . When you realize that things suddenly come out of your subconscious or your unconscious when you’re talking to an open microphone, sometimes it frightens you. 

In the sixth game, Brooklyn had a three-run lead when Joe DiMaggio came to bat. In Barber’s words: “Here’s the pitch. Swung on, belted. It’s a long one deep to the left center. Back goes Gionfriddo. Back, back, back, back, back, back. He makes a one-handed catch against the bullpen. Oh, doctor. [Pause for crowd noise.] He went exactly against the railing in front of the bullpen and reached up with one hand and took a home run away from DiMaggio.” Barber said those calls demonstrated an important rule for a play-by-play broadcaster: On a long drive, watch the outfielder; he’ll be the first to know whether it’s catchable. Thus, “Back goes Gionfriddo.” “Henrich going back. He can’t get it.”

More than thirty years later, a young broadcaster named Chris Berman on the upstart cable network ESPN adopted “back, back, back,” he said, as a tribute to Barber.

Barber was celebrated for his vivid imagery, all the more memorable because he brought the country sayings of his Southern upbringing to urban Brooklyn. Cincinnati public radio station WVXU assembled this Red Barber sampler:

The game “is just as tight as a brand-new pair of shoes on a rainy day.”
“They’ll tear up the pea patch before the day is over.”
“The bases are FOB — they’re full of Brooklyns”—he acknowledged he made up after seeing the term, which meant “free on board” in the shipping industry, and turning it over in his mind. His most enduring coinage was “sitting in the catbird seat.” In Barber’s lexicon, that meant a batter with a three-ball, no-strike count or a team with a comfortable lead. 

Ernie Harwell, who broke into big-league broadcasting under Barber in 1948 and lasted for fifty-five seasons, told WVXU, “The ironic thing was, he was a very cultured man, and on the air he sounded like some guy from the backwoods, you know . . . And he really wasn’t. He loved the opera and he loved the classics and all that kind of stuff. He lived on Park Avenue in New York.”

Vin Scully, who inherited Red’s mantle as “Voice of the Dodgers,” joined the broadcasts in 1950 as a twenty-two-year-old. “His work ethics were so strong that he imbued me with that spirit,” Scully told WVXU. “Get to the ballpark early. Check, check, recheck. Talk to players, managers constantly. And that rubbed off on me.”

In 1950 attorney Walter O’Malley bought Rickey’s 25 percent interest in the Dodgers and took control of the franchise. Red’s relationship with the new owner was touchy. “O’Malley wanted to cut me down to size,” he wrote in his autobiography. “He is a devious man, about the most devious man I ever met.” Barber broadcast his thirteenth World Series in 1952, again sharing the NBC radio and television microphones with Mel Allen. It would be his last.

Ever since the Gillette Company bought exclusive rights to the Series in 1939, Barber had chafed at the company’s cavalier treatment of announcers. By 1953 Gillette paid the broadcasters just $200 a game “for the biggest sports event on coast-to-coast television,” he fumed. Barber declined to broadcast the ’53 Series when the company refused to negotiate his fee. When Red told O’Malley what had happened, O’Malley’s reply—“That’s your problem”—ended Barber’s relationship with the Dodgers. His contract for the Brooklyn broadcasts had expired, and the sponsors had made no move to renew it.

A few days after he left the Dodgers, Red was hired by the Yankees. The new job was quite a comedown. For twenty years in Cincinnati and Brooklyn, he had been the principal broadcaster, handing out assignments to his assistants. He decided how many innings they would call, who would do which commercials, who would handle pregame and postgame shows. 

The Yankees’ principal broadcaster, Mel Allen, was the most famous sports announcer in the country. Red was hired to handle pregame and postgame shows on televised home games and to work a few innings of play-by-play. He traveled with the team only occasionally. “Mel accepted me as an equal,” he insisted.” . . . he could not have been nicer to me either then or all through the years we worked together”

Red was forced to adjust, grudgingly, to fundamental changes in the broadcasting industry. In 1939 he had broadcast the first major-league game on television over NBC’s experimental station W2XBS, when only a few dozen homes had TV sets. In the 1950s television became the dominant medium. Like many other radio veterans, Barber never accepted television. He endured it. He explained why in Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat: “On TV it’s the director’s show, and the broadcaster is an instrument of his, like a camera. On radio, it’s my show, where my knowledge and experience and taste and judgment decide what goes and what doesn’t. On radio, you’re an artist. On TV, you’re a servant.”

Barber deplored the invasion of the broadcast booth by retired ballplayers—he dismissed them as “former-great-star-expert(s).” By 1965, after the Yankees fired Allen for “popping off,” Barber was sharing the booth with three of those “experts:” ex-shortstop Phil Rizzuto, ex-second baseman Jerry Coleman, and Joe Garagiola, a onetime backup catcher who had parlayed a quick wit and a trove of real and invented anecdotes about his boyhood pal Yogi Berra into a broadcasting career. Garagiola committed what Barber considered the unforgivable sin: “He cut in on me in the middle of sentences . . . He ran over fellows.”

CBS had bought the Yankees, and network executive Michael Burke took over as the team’s president in September 1966. He curtly informed Barber, “We have decided not to seek to renew your contract.” Barber thought he knew why. On a chilly, rainy day near the end of the 1966 season when baseball’s marquee franchise fell to last place, the Yankees played a home game before 413 fans. Barber wrote in The Broadcasters, “This was the smallest crowd, by far, in the history of the massive ballpark built by Babe Ruth, Ed Barrow, and Colonel Jake Ruppert.” He asked the television director for a shot of the empty seats. The director refused, and Barber was told that the order came from the CBS executive who supervised Yankee broadcasts. But Barber was still a reporter. As he recalled it, he said, “I don’t know what the paid attendance is today—but whatever it is, it is the smallest crowd in the history of Yankee Stadium . . . and this smallest crowd is the story, not the ballgame.”

According to the University of Florida’s Smathers Library, where Red’s papers are housed, he broadcast play-by-play on thirteen World Series, four baseball All-Star Games, five Army-Navy games, one Sugar Bowl, two Rose Bowls, eight Orange Bowls, and four National Football League championship games. That career was over. 

At age fifty-eight Barber began what he called his retirement at his home in Key Biscayne, Florida, near Miami. But it was an active retirement. He wrote a syndicated newspaper column and four books, and did sportscasts for Miami radio and TV stations. Cable television impresario Ted Turner hired Barber and Mel Allen to call the 1978 Little League World Series, one of the most bizarre anachronisms in broadcasting history.

That same year, he and Allen—forever linked—became the first broadcasters honored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame. They received the Ford C. Frick Award for “major contributions to baseball,” an award named for the commissioner Barber despised. 

Red would take one more star turn on a national stage, introducing himself to a generation of listeners who knew only the Los Angeles Dodgers and who, if they followed baseball at all, followed it primarily on television. In 1981 he joined National Public Radio’s Morning Edition as a regular commentator, appearing for four minutes every Friday at 7:35 a.m. Eastern time.

The host of Morning Edition, Bob Edwards, lovingly captured those years in Fridays With Red published after Barber’s death. The Barbers had left the fast-growing Miami area for the smaller city of Tallahassee, where Lylah had attended Florida State College for Women, the predecessor of Florida State University. Tallahassee station WFSU-FM ran an audio line to their home, and Red broadcast from a desk in his office. Nominally the spot was a sports commentary. In reality, it was a free-form conversation about just about anything, often including his flower garden and the adventures of his cats. He talked about opera, quoted Victor Hugo and Kahlil Gibran, and delivered condensed versions of some of the sermons he had preached as a lay reader in the Episcopal Church. 

To the buttoned-down Edwards—who had every word of his broadcasts scripted, even “I’m Bob Edwards”—it was both a nightmare and a delight. Red insisted that his segment be live. He made it unpredictable. A producer would call him on Thursday to discuss topics for the next morning’s broadcast. By Friday, Red had often changed his mind and took off in a totally unexpected direction. Edwards described himself as Barber’s straight man. Because Red talked about his camellias so often, Edwards’s wife planted one in their back yard. Red wanted to know what variety it was. Edwards replied, “Pink.”

“Red’s spot on ‘Morning Edition’ was the most popular feature of any program on public radio,” Edwards wrote.” . . . And for many listeners, Red was a reminder of a father, a grandfather, or a favorite uncle they had—or wished they had.” Barber was as much a perfectionist as ever: Edwards said he could hear the click of Red’s stopwatch at the beginning and end of his allotted four minutes. His career had come full circle: from noncommercial station WRUF in 1930 to noncommercial National Public Radio more than fifty years later. In his first NPR broadcast he said, “I’m a child of radio.”

In the 1980s Lylah developed Alzheimer’s disease, and much of the rest of Red’s life was devoted to caring for her. “By the time I met him in the early ‘80s, he was so frail it seemed a gust of wind might take him away,” Edwards wrote. Barber had suffered various physical ailments since the 1940s, going deaf in his left ear and surviving a heart attack and surgery for ulcers that removed much of his stomach. On October 8, 1992, he begged off the next day’s broadcast, blaming a sore throat. On that Friday he drove himself and Lylah to a hospital. He underwent emergency surgery for an intestinal blockage and fell into a coma. 

Red Barber died at eighty-four on October 22, 1992, at the Tallahassee Memorial Regional Medical Center. The New York Times reported that the cause of death was pneumonia and other complications from surgery. His ashes were buried in his yard, beneath five camellias. In his Morning Edition tribute, Bob Edwards said, “One of the great voices of America will speak to us no more, and the camellias will never smell as sweet.” Red would not have liked that; camellias have no scent.

In Sanford, Florida, where Red grew up, a municipal park bears his name. In Tallahassee, where he lived his last years, Florida State University’s Center for Public Broadcasting sits at 1600 Red Barber Plaza. His alma mater, the University of Florida, annually awards the Red Barber Radio Scholarship—$700 to a junior or senior majoring in telecommunications, with a preference to students planning to pursue careers in sports broadcasting. In Los Angeles Red’s heir, Vin Scully, continued into the twenty-first century as the voice of the Dodgers.

Sources

Barber, Red. The Broadcasters. New York: The Dial Press, 1970.

Barber, Red, with Robert Creamer. Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968.

Barber, Red, Show Me the Way to Go Home. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1971.

Barber, Red, Walk in the Spirit. New York: The Dial Press, 1969.

Barber, Red. 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball.Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1982.

Barber, Lylah, Lylah. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1985.

Edwards, Bob. Fridays With Red.New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Smith, Curt. The Storytellers . New York: Macmillan, 1995.

Smith, Curt. Voices of the Game. South Bend, IN: Diamond Communications Inc., 1987.

Thurber, James, “The Catbird Seat,” The New Yorker, (n.d.) 1942, reprinted in The Thurber Carnival, New York: Modern Library, 1945

Salon, November 7, 2000.

Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2002.

From the Catbird Seat: Red Barber, a 1993 radio documentary written and produced by Greg Rhodes for public station WVXU in Cincinnati. It included excerpts from his play-by-play broadcasts and his later interviews.

Born on December 19, 1924, Rex Edward Barney was the youngest of four children of Marie and Eugene Spencer Barney. It was a typical winter night in Omaha, Nebraska—twenty degrees below zero. “My father could not get the old Model T Ford started, so he called somebody to help him rush my mother to the hospital,” Barney wrote in his 1993 autobiography. “She told me I was born in the elevator on the way up to the delivery room.”

Rex’s father worked on the Union Pacific Railroad for forty-five years and eventually became a general foreman. He left home on Sunday night and rode the rails throughout the week before returning on Friday evening. When Rex was born, his sisters, Beatrice and Bernice, were thirteen and eleven, respectively, and his brother, Ted, was nine.

Barney was a star basketball and baseball player at Creighton Prep, a Catholic school for boys in Omaha. He excelled most on the basketball court, leading the team to a pair of state titles and earning all-state recognition. As a high school pitcher, Barney was an angular six-feet-three, 185-pound right-hander who struck out batters by the bushel. He was wild, but that is not unusual at that level. Creighton Prep won the state baseball tournament in two of Rex’s four years.

Barney credited much of his early success to a man he called “one of Nebraska’s greatest high school coaches,” Skip Palrang, who coached every sport at Creighton Prep, managed the city’s American Legion team, and later became athletic director at Boys Town.

Palrang’s formidable presence prepared Rex for his years with the volatile Leo Durocher, first playing for him when he was the Brooklyn manager, and later playing against him when Durocher became the manager of the New York Giants.

The Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Cardinals, New York Yankees, and Brooklyn Dodgers all sent scouts to look at Barney when he was just a sophomore at Creighton Prep. He also began to receive scholarship offers for baseball and basketball from several colleges, most notably Nebraska, Stanford, and Notre Dame. 

In the spring of 1943, after Barney’s draft board informed him that he soon would be inducted into the Army, Rex opted to sign a contract with the Dodgers. The signing bonus was $2,500—but all but $500 of that amount was contingent on Barney’s returning from the service and proving he was capable of resuming his baseball career. 

Barney enjoyed a meteoric rise through the Dodgers farm system that spring and summer. He reported to Durham, North Carolina, of the Class B Piedmont League in May, and made his debut in relief on June 4 against the Norfolk Tars. His first professional pitch whizzed about five feet above the head of batter Jack Phillips and tore through the chicken-wire screen in front of the field-level press box and conked the local sports editor on the head.

No wonder that sports editor reported, “(Barney’s) pitching was of the compass type—he threw in the general direction of the plate.” Still, the scribe acknowledged, “The lad has plenty of steam and may develop into a pitcher.”

The Dodgers thought so, too. Early on, Durham manager Bruno Betzel took Barney and infielder Gene Mauch aside and told them, “You’re the only two guys on this club with a chance to go up.” Pitching with a dreadful last-place team, Barney won four games and lost six, but his earned run average was a solid 3.00. He struck out seventy-one batters and walked fifty-one in eighty-one innings.

In late July 1943 both Barney and Mauch were promoted to the Dodgers’ top farm club, the Montreal Royals of the International League. Rex appeared in just four games with the Royals and dropped his only decision, but his 2.45 ERA and eighteen strikeouts in twenty-two innings impressed Branch Rickey and the other Dodgers brass. Rex was elevated to Brooklyn for the final five weeks of the season.

As Barney wrote: “The Brooklyn Dodgers, Ebbets Field, and baseball was the greatest triple play God ever executed on this planet. If a player didn’t fall in love with Ebbets Field, there had to be something wrong with him. And those fans—their enthusiasm for their beloved Bums was overwhelming. Today they call it chemistry; I prefer to think of it as a love affair. That’s what made it such a tragedy when the team left Brooklyn.”

The first major-league pitch he threw struck Cubs leadoff hitter Eddie Stanky squarely in the middle of his back. But although he was still nearly four months short of his nineteenth birthday, Rex proved he belonged in the wartime National League, winning two of his four decisions. Barney entered the Army in September 1943 and served at Fort Riley, Kansas, where he played baseball. He and thousands of other apprehensive GIs spent two weeks aboard a troopship, a converted Italian luxury liner, en route from New York to Le Havre, France. Their twelve-ship convoy spent much of the voyage dodging Nazi U-boats; four ships didn’t make it. 

Assigned to the Fourth and Sixth Armored Divisions of the Third Army, Barney saw action in France and Germany, took German shrapnel in a leg and his back, and was awarded two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. His most memorable encounter, though, was with the fiery American general George C. Patton. 

Barney was the commander of a lead tank, roaming the advance positions to draw enemy fire from sunup to sundown. On this day, there was a commotion in the rear, and a Jeep flying four stars pulled abreast. “I recognized him immediately,” Barney told Dick Young of the New York Daily News. “He was my idol. He was sitting behind a 50-caliber machine gun.”

They saluted, and Patton said, “Sergeant, where is the front?”

“General,” Barney responded, “the front of this tank is the front.”

“That’s too goddamn close for me! Carry on,” Patton said, and the Jeep turned around and headed in the opposite direction.

After his discharge Barney rejoined the Dodgers in the spring of 1946. Although the club surprised pundits by challenging the powerful St. Louis Cardinals and tying the Redbirds for the pennant (losing two games to none in the playoff), Rex endured a disappointing year, winning twice and losing five games. Still, the Barney fastball offered considerable promise for 1947. 

Just before the start of the ’47 season, Dodgers manager Leo Durocher was suspended “for conduct detrimental to baseball,” and replaced by Burt Shotton. Like Durocher, Shotton was perplexed by Barney’s inability to cure his wildness. Rex reversed his 1946 record, winning five games and losing two. But his strikeout to walk ratio remained a sore point and turned most of his games into nail-biters.

On May 1, 1947 Barney married Beverly Duda, a girl he had known since high school in Omaha, at a Catholic church in Brooklyn. They had two children, Christine and Kevin. The marriage ended in divorce.

For Barney, life on the playing field was far less rewarding, especially late in the season. Nevertheless, Shotton selected Rex to start Game Five of the World Series against the Yankees. For four and two-thirds innings, he allowed just two hits and two runs, but he walked nine batters.

The opening inning epitomized Barney’s career. With no out, the Yankees loaded the bases on a pair of walks, to George Stirnweiss and Johnny Lindell, sandwiched around Tommy Henrich’s double. DiMaggio was due up next.

Coach Clyde Sukeforth walked to the mound and told Barney, in words to this effect: “Nothing to worry about. Just strike this bum out and get the next one to hit into a double play.”

Well, Barney overpowered the Yankee Clipper with a strikeout, got the second out on George McQuinn’s comebacker to the mound, forcing Stirnweiss at the plate, and then fanned third baseman Billy Johnson.

There was more trouble in the third when, with one out, Barney issued consecutive walks to Henrich and Lindell. This time, Rex induced DiMaggio to hit into a 6-4-3 double play.

Pitcher Frank Shea’s run-producing single followed a pair of walks in the fourth. With one out in the fifth, Barney tried to throw another fastball past DiMaggio, but this time the Yankee center fielder hit it into the left-field stands. Shotton replaced Rex with two outs in the inning after he gave up his ninth base on balls. Shea won the game, 2–1; Barney took the loss, and the Yankees went on to win the Series in seven games.

Rex seemed to put it together in 1948, winning fifteen games against thirteen losses, including his crowning baseball moment, the no-hitter against the Giants. Rex ranked second in the league in strikeouts, and he tied for second in shutouts with four. His 3.10 earned run average ranked fifth in the league. This was his only professional season in which he struck out more batters than he walked, 138 versus 122.

But if ‘48 was a personal high for Barney, it was a season of transformation and turmoil for the Dodgers. On July 15 the baseball world was astounded to learn that Durocher, back as manager after his yearlong suspension, had resigned from the Dodgers and replaced the fired Mel Ott as the Giants’ field leader. Shotton, in turn, returned to Brooklyn to lead the Dodgers.

Barney admitted that he was “devastated” to see Durocher go. “I cried when he left. I was used to tough managers and I felt that I had begun to turn things around for him and now he was gone.”

Rex didn’t always see eye to eye with Shotton, but he continued to pitch well. On August 18, he outdueled the Phillies’ Robin Roberts with a one-hitter, winning by a 1–0 score in Philadelphia. The Phillies’ lone hit was a looping single to center by Ralph “Putsy” Caballero in the seventh inning.

Barney’s 2–0 no-hitter against the Giants came on a rainy night at the Polo Grounds. The date was September 9. It had rained throughout the day, but with a sizable advance sale at the gate (36,324), the Giants decided it would be wise to start the game.

The opening inning provided the most angst for Barney. After he walked the leadoff man, Jack “Lucky” Lohrke, on four pitches and retired Whitey Lockman, he fielded Sid Gordon’s slow roller and threw wildly in an attempt to get a force out at second base. Then cleanup hitter Johnny Mize walked and the bases were loaded. But Willard Marshall hit the first pitch to second baseman Jackie Robinson, who started a 4-6-3 double play.  

The only other Giant to reach base was losing pitcher Monte Kennedy, on Robinson’s error in the third inning. Barney retired the last twenty Giants in order, capped by Lockman’s foul popup to catcher Bruce Edwards for the final out. Remarkably, only forty-one of Barney’s 116 pitches were wide of the strike zone on this night. Only four Giants went down on strikes.

Durocher, who had been the Dodgers’ manager just weeks earlier but was now the Giants’ field boss, ran past Barney on his way to the clubhouse. “I’m proud of you, kid,” he said to Rex.

Another version of that encounter appears in Peter Golenbock’s book Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Durocher reportedly told Barney: “You skinny son of a bitch. Why’d you have to do this to me? I’m your greatest fan. Why did you do it to me?”

The plate umpire on this memorable evening, Babe Pinelli, called Barney “the fastest thing in baseball today. I don’t care about Lemon or Feller. I’ve seen them. This kid is it. And no finer boy in baseball could have pitched it. He has a heart as big as a lion, and a wonderful disposition.”

Thirty-two years later, in 1980, the New York Baseball Writers presented the “Casey Stengel You-Could-Look-It-Up” award to Barney at their annual dinner in recognition of the last no-hitter at the storied Polo Grounds. No other Brooklyn pitcher ever no-hit the Giants in their own ballpark.

Unfortunately, Barney had reached his peak at the age of twenty-three. With the notable exception of a second one-hitter, against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field on September 19, Rex was a so-so pitcher with the pennant-winning Dodgers in 1949. He won nine games, dropped eight, and his earned run average was a high 4.41.

In the World Series, with the Dodgers trailing the Yankees three games to one, Shotton gave Barney the ball for Game Five. He allowed five runs in two and two-thirds innings and took the loss. The Yankees went on to wrap up Casey Stengel’s first world championship as a manager with a 10–6 victory.

The 1950 season ended in disappointment for the Dodgers when they lost the pennant to Philadelphia on the season’s final day. Limited to twenty appearances and only one start, Barney won two of three decisions, but his ERA skied to 6.42.

Some observers, and Barney himself, believe that a broken ankle, suffered sliding into second base on the final day of the 1948 season, forced him to alter his pitching style. “In 1949 I won nine ballgames, but from then on, by my own admission, I never had the same motion, never had it again,” he told Golenbock. “I never got into the same flow, and in baseball everything is rhythm.” 

The Dodgers optioned Barney to Fort Worth of the Texas League in 1951, hoping that manager Bobby Bragan, a former Dodgers catcher, could help Rex learn the strike zone. It did not happen. In five appearances with the Class AA club, he walked thirty-nine batters in just fourteen innings. In a game against Houston, Barney broke the league record for walks given up by a pitcher in a game by issuing sixteen in seven and two-thirds innings. 

In 1952 Rex was assigned to the St. Paul Saints, the Dodgers’ farm club in the American Association. His pitching line for the Saints that season read: four games, three innings pitched, no victories, one loss, fourteen walks, seventeen earned runs, and a 51.00 ERA. Barney’s professional baseball career was over. His major-league won-lost record was 35-31, with a 4.34 earned run average. The strikeouts (336) were outnumbered by the walks (410).

At twenty-eight Rex Barney was a has-been. He admitted to contemplating suicide. But then he remembered what Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber had told him a decade earlier: That he had a pleasing radio voice, and should consider getting into broadcasting when his playing career was over.

Barney did just that. He started a circuitous climb up the radio ladder—some work in his hometown of Omaha, a 250-watt station in Vero Beach, Florida, some play-by-play work at WCAW in Charleston, West Virginia, the game-of-the-day for the Mutual Broadcasting System. When the Dodgers and Giants went west in 1958, WOR-TV hired Barney and Al Helfer to bring National League games into New York.

With assistance from Lee MacPhail, the Baltimore Orioles’ general manager who had been an office boy during Rex’s early Brooklyn days, Barney began a sports talk show in Baltimore in 1965. He became a celebrity in his adopted city.

During the late 1960s he began filling in for Bill Bolling, the public address announcer at Memorial Stadium. When Bolling departed in the spring of 1973, Barney became the Orioles’ regular PA man, a job he held during the move to Camden Yards and until his death on August 11, 1997. He is buried in Lorraine Park Cemetery, Woodlawn, Maryland.

His trademark sign-off, “THANK Youuuu,” and cry of “Give that fan a contract,” after a spectator made a nice play in the stands, became part of the Baltimore culture. “His voice was almost like a security blanket,” said Mike Flanagan, the former Orioles twenty-game winner and now a television announcer.

Barney’s last years were plagued by ill health. He suffered a stroke in 1983 and a heart attack in 1991, one year before he had a leg amputated because of circulation problems associated with diabetes. His second marriage, to a Baltimore schoolteacher named Carole Bennett, also ended in divorce. 

“I should have been up there with the greats,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I should have gone right up the ladder, but too many rungs were missing.”

Sources

Barney, Rex, with Norman L. Macht. Rex Barney’s THANK Youuuu for 50 Years in Baseball from Brooklyn to Baltimore, Tidewater Publishers, 1993.

Barney, Rex, with Bill Roeder. “Can’t Anybody Help Me?” Collier’s, April 16, 1954.

Corio, Ray. “Rex Barney, 72, Dodger Pitcher; Threw a No-Hitter for Brooklyn,” New York Times, August. 13, 1997.

King, Larry. “Rex Barney:” Alive, Well and Talkative,” Sporting News, May 28, 1984.

Madden, Bill. “A Baseball Voice is Silenced: Rex Barney Dead at 72; Ex-Dodger, Announcer,” New York Daily News, August. 13, 1997.

Young, Dick. New York Daily News, Sept. 10, 1948.

Baseball Guide and Record Book, Charles C. Spink & Son, 1944, ‘48, ‘49, ’50.

Rex Barney player file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Aug. 12, 2009.

Henry Bernard Behrman was born in Brooklyn on June 27, 1921. By the time he reached high school, his family had moved to Maspeth, in the borough of Queens. The Dodgers signed Behrman after he attended a tryout at Ebbets Field in 1940. The youngster spent the 1941 campaign playing for the Valdosta Trojans in the Class D Georgia-Florida League. His 18-10 record and 3.11 ERA earned him a promotion to the Durham (North Carolina) Bulls in the Class B Piedmont League for 1942. On July 25 he tossed a no-hitter for the Bulls at Asheville, and completed the season with a 14-11 record and a 2.92 ERA. 

At the close of the 1942 campaign, Behrman entered the Army. After basic training, he was assigned to the 326th Glider Infantry Regiment. He spent the bulk of his time in service at the Alliance Army Air Base in Nebraska, where he pitched for the base team. In February 1945 the 326th arrived in France. With the end of the war in Europe in May, Behrman was selected to play for the 13th Airborne Division Black Cats, who compiled a 33-4 record. The 326th returned to the United States in August and, on January 30, 1946, Behrman was mustered out of the military. The Dodgers assigned him to the Montreal Royals, their top farm club.

Despite his status as a raw rookie, Behrman proclaimed that he would rather quit baseball than spend the 1946 season in the minors. During spring training, the twenty-four-year-old hurler impressed the Dodgers brass with his rubber arm and his money pitch, a lively fastball that zoomed upward or sank as it neared home plate. On April 2 Behrman started for Montreal against the Dodgers and held them to six hits and no runs in seven innings. 

“He has what it takes to win,” observed Branch Rickey Jr., head of the Dodgers’ minor-league operation.¹ “He’s the sleeper of this camp.” Fresco Thompson, the team’s new assistant farm director, noted, “He pitched a couple of innings the other day, right after having been laid up with the flu, and he made me sit up and take notice. He has something more than a chance of making the grade in a hurry.”²

The day before the start of the 1946 season, Behrman was reassigned to the parent club—and quickly proved himself a stellar addition to the Dodgers’ mound staff. He began the campaign in the starting rotation and impressed in his major-league debut, turning back the Braves in Boston on April 17. After a shaky two innings, in which he allowed four hits and two runs, Behrman settled down and gave up just five more safeties in the final seven frames. 

Behrman eventually was relegated to the bullpen, where manager Leo Durocher felt he was most needed. On June 24 he relieved Kirby Higbe in the second inning of a game against Cincinnati and whiffed seven of the first eleven hitters he faced. Three days later he took over for Joe Hatten against Boston with two outs and the bases loaded in the fifth inning. In what New York Times sportswriter Roscoe McGowen described as an “almost flawless pitching performance,” Behrman got out of the inning and pitched four more frames, allowing just one Brave to reach base.³

In 1947 Behrman reported to spring training underweight and promptly hurt his arm. On May 14 he married Ellen Leffert, a Long Island native; they eventually became the parents of five offspring. Yet that same year, a further distraction for the hurler came when he was hit with a paternity suit. His preference for the nightlife over keeping fit was being recognized within the Dodgers’ inner circle.        

Behrman appeared in forty games for the 1947 Dodgers, posting a 5-3 record—but with a 5.48 ERA. Then again, he did not spend the entire campaign with the team. On May 3, he, pitchers Kirby Higbe and Cal McLish, catcher Dixie Howell, and infielder Gene Mauch were traded to Pittsburgh for outfielder Al Gionfriddo and a sum that was reported to be between $100,000 and $200,000. Behrman’s performance in Pittsburgh was lackluster. He got into just ten contests, losing two with no victories. His ERA was an abysmal 9.12. However, his trade to the Bucs was conditional. If the Pirates wished, they could return Behrman to Brooklyn without explanation. And so on June 14, six weeks after being dispatched to Pittsburgh, Behrman was sold back to Brooklyn for $25,000. (Some accounts list the sum at $50,000.) 

Upon his return to the Dodgers, sportswriter Herbert Goren observed that “it seemed as if some of the zing was off his fastball.”⁴ Behrman was inconsistent for the rest of the season, with his outing in Pittsburgh on September 17 being one of the high points. In the eighth inning, he replaced Hal Gregg, and the 33,916 fans who had packed into Forbes Field greeted him with boos. Behrman promptly quieted the crowd by striking out two future Hall of Famers, Ralph Kiner and Hank Greenberg. Then he set the Bucs down in order in the ninth inning, preserving Brooklyn’s 4–2 victory. Behrman appeared in five games during the 1947 World Series, all in relief, giving up nine hits in six and a third innings. 

In February 1948 the Dodgers assigned Behrman to Montreal. His reputation as an irresponsible young man who was not reaching his potential as a frontline hurler now was firmly in place among the Dodgers higher-ups—and his demotion to the Royals reportedly was a disciplinary measure. On March 3 Behrman disclosed that Branch Rickey, the Dodgers boss, had given him the okay to try to make a deal for himself with another team. He had been unable to do so. But he promised that his foray to the minors would be temporary. “Maybe,” he mused, “this is just what I needed. I know I’ve made some mistakes. I’ll work my head and arm off for Montreal and then next spring maybe they’ll give me another chance. I know I’ve got the stuff to win for them.”

Buzzy Bavasi, the Montreal general manager, reported that Behrman stayed in shape and was well-behaved. “He’s the first guy to check in every night,” Bavasi said.⁶ Behrman compiled a snazzy 6-2 record that earned him a return to the Dodgers. Curiously, he initially balked at the move. “I am very happy where I am and I want no part of the Dodgers,” he claimed, but then he relented after conferring with Bavasi.⁷

Still, the Dodgers brass was not pleased. Behrman was optioned back to Montreal for what were described in the press as “personal reasons.” After winning two more games for the Royals and compiling an overall ERA of 2.55—that at season’s end was second best in the International League—he was summoned back to Brooklyn. Behrman was described by Roscoe McGowen as “the returned prodigal.”⁸

Behrman got into thirty-four games for the 1948 Dodgers; his record was 5-4, and his ERA was 4.05. On August 25 he was a key participant in a controversial play. In a game against Pittsburgh, Carl Erskine relieved Hugh Casey in the ninth inning with two outs and runners on first and third. With the count on Eddie Bockman at three balls and one strike, manager Burt Shotton replaced Erskine with Behrman. On Behrman’s first pitch, Bockman grounded to Pee Wee Reese for a force play at second, ending the game with the Dodgers in front, 11–9. 

However, according to the major-league rules, a reliever who enters a game must complete pitching to at least one batter before being replaced. The Pirates disputed Erskine’s quick exit. Their protest was allowed by National League President Ford Frick; Bockman’s at-bat was erased and the contest was scheduled for completion on September 21. In the replay, Erskine walked Bockman to load the bases. Behrman then entered the game. His first three pitches to Stan Rojek were balls. His next two were called strikes. Then Rojek hit a bounder that caromed off the glove of third sacker Tommy Brown and the tying and winning runs scored. 

In January 1949 Branch Rickey hired Behrman to work at Ebbets Field as an assistant groundskeeper. Rickey did so to keep tabs on the errant hurler. For eight hours a day, at ninety cents an hour, Behrman toiled to prepare the Ebbets Field turf for the coming season, trading his baseball uniform and glove for work clothes, and a rake, pick, and shovel. 

“I’ve worked in the yard at home, but this is a big yard,” he told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in February. “I like the work even if it does get me up at six o’clock in the morning. There won’t be any alibi for Pee Wee Reese fumbling a ground ball behind me when I get through smoothing out this infield.”⁹

Behrman was eagerly anticipating the coming campaign. “I hope Mr. Rickey will let me start this year,” he declared. “I could win fifteen for the Dodgers. Twelve if he keeps me on relief. I didn’t have such a lousy record last season, either. But I would have to go out for a pinch-hitter and the next guy to come in would blow the ball game wide open.”¹⁰

Rickey optimistically observed, “This may be the making of that boy. He told me he never had worked for wages in his life.”¹¹ The general manager surely must have been smiling when Behrman noted, “I like [the groundskeeper position]. But, boy, am I tired when I get home at night! I eat my dinner and go right to bed at 7:30.”¹² Rickey’s mood quickly changed when, after two weeks on the job, Behrman abruptly left Brooklyn and headed to Vero Beach before he was scheduled to report for spring training. Rickey soured even further when the pitcher made public his claim that the team refused to pay him the $75 he had spent while awaiting the opening of camp. After driving from New York to Florida, Behrman was rebuffed when he tried to enter Dodgertown—even though Pee Wee Reese, Ralph Branca, and several newspapermen already were living on the grounds. Behrman was forced to move into a Vero Beach inn. 

Even though he had signed his contract for the 1949 campaign, an irate Behrman promised to not officially report to spring training. He now claimed that laboring with the Ebbets Field grounds crew had affected his health, resulting in his “coughing every day.” He said “working under those damp stands in Ebbets Field was no good for me. Since I’ve been down here, my coughing has stopped almost completely.”¹³

Before the close of spring training, Rickey sold Behrman to the New York Giants for a reported $25,000. He pitched in forty-three games, including four starts, and compiled a 3-3 record with a 4.92 ERA. Behrman returned to the Giants in 1950 and suffered through a difficult spring training. He was sidelined by a badly bruised left knee and a series of nosebleeds, and had a cyst removed from the left side of his face. Despite these maladies, he was pitching in exhibition games by mid-March. As the spring workouts neared their close, however, Behrman was released outright to the Pacific Coast League Oakland Oaks.

Behrman had seen his last days as a big leaguer. During his career he primarily worked in relief, starting only twenty-seven of the 174 major league games in which he appeared, and compiling a 24-17 record and 4.40 ERA. As Brooklyn Daily Eagle writer Tommy Holmes noted a couple of years after the hurler’s departure from the big leagues, “Behrman had the arm. He could knock the bat out of your hands with his fast ball and catch you looking at his curve.”¹⁴

But his time in the majors is most notable for what he did off the field rather than on—and for his well-earned reputation for disobeying the rules. While on the road, he often ignored curfews; it was no different when the Dodgers were at home. “Hank lived at St. Albans, on Long Island, and rarely made it to Ebbets Field on time,” reported Loren McMullen in the October 1951 issue of Baseball Digest. “But he never was caught without an excuse. Either the train broke down, or his mother suffered an appendicitis attack, his brother was chased by gunmen, or a tornado struck his community.”¹⁵

After finishing in the majors, Behrman hung around professional baseball for a few more seasons. In 1950, he compiled a snazzy 17-8 record in Oakland, with a more than respectable 4.25 ERA. It was Behrman’s last top-flight campaign. He spent the next season playing for the Class AA Oklahoma City Indians in the Texas League and the Class AAA San Francisco Seals and Oakland Oaks of the PCL. In 1952, Behrman was hurling for the Class AAA American Association Toledo Mud Hens and Charleston Senators He was back with the Senators in 1953, but went 6-16 with a 4.87 ERA, and was plagued by arm trouble. Charleston released him the following spring, and his baseball career was over. 

Behrman returned to New York, found employment as a truck driver for a food concessionaire and faded into obscurity. In late 1986, he underwent a triple heart bypass, and passed away the following January 20. The causes of death were complications from the operation and the onset of pneumonia. He was sixty-five years old, and was survived by his wife and five children. Behrman is buried in Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island. 

Author’s note

I also would like to acknowledge: Bill Carle, Bill Deane, Craig Lukshin, Steven McPherson, Stephen Milman, Rod Nelson, and Roland Sullivan.

Sources

Allen, Maury. “Former Dodger Behrman dies.” New York Post, January 28, 1987.

Holmes, Tommy. “King Recrowned by New Pitch.” Baseball Digest, July 1951.

McMullen, Loren. “It’s Happy-Go-Behrman.” Baseball Digest, October 1951.

Richman, Milton. “It Was a Year for Throwing Spat Balls.” Baseball Digest, January 1949.

Burr, Harold C. “Rickey Picks Winter Job for Behrman as Pick-Shovel Artist.” Brooklyn Eagle, February 9, 1949.

Daley, Arthur. “Sports of the Times: The Voice of the Turtle.” New York Times, February 28, 1961.

——. “Sports of the Times: Touching All Bases.” New York Times, March 29, 1949.

Drebinger, John. “Baseball Season Begins Tomorrow.” New York Times, April 17, 1949.

——. “Dodgers to Play Pirates Today; Giants Engage Reds Tomorrow.” New York Times, May 5, 1947.

——. “Giants Are Back At Phoenix Base.” New York Times, March 29, 1949.

——. “Hatten Wins, 10-3, Aided By 3 Homers.” New York Times, April 20, 1949.

Effrat, Louis. “Behrman Returns From Montreal To Bolster Dodger Mound Staff.” New York Times, June 24, 1948.

——. “Dodgers Acquire Negro Shortstop.” New York Times, February 24, 1949.

——. “Dodgers Top Reds in 13th Inning, 6-5.” New York Times, June 25, 1946.

Goren, Herbert. “Behrman Shows Winning Form.” New York Sun, June 29, 1947.

McGowen, Roscoe. “Arrival of Casey Cheers Durocher.” New York Times, March 4, 1948.

——. “Behrman of Dodgers Halts Braves In His First Big League Start, 4—2.” New York Times, April 18, 1946.

——. “Braves Set Back Dodgers by 5-4 On Torgeson’s Hit in 9th Inning.” New York Times, July 29, 1947.

——. “Brooks Bow to Blackwell, 4-0, Then Top Reds in 9-8 Slugfest.” New York Times, June 23, 1947.

——. “Dodgers Seeking Home-Run Hitter.” New York Times, March 28, 1947.

——. “Gregg Wins in Box For Brooks, 4 to 2.” New York Times, September 18, 1947.

——. “Montreal Defeats Dodgers by 6 to 1, Homer in 9th Preventing Shut-Out.” New York Times, April 3, 1946.

——. “Restriction Irks Pilot of Dodgers.” New York Times, March 7, 1946.

——. “33,045 See Dodgers Defeat Braves, 3-1.” New York Times, June 28, 1946.

Murray, Arch. “Behrman Gets Last Laugh—He’s Back!” New York Post, June 10, 1948.

Roeder, Bill. “Unworried by World Conditions, Behrman May Be Big Help to Bums.” New York World-Telegram, June 24, 1948.

Steiger, Gus. “Flock Glad Behrman Heart Was in Flatbush.” New York Daily Mirror, October 14, 1947.

Young, Dick. “Giants Buy Behrman For 25 Gs.” New York Daily News, March 27, 1949.

——. “No Fatted Calf, Flock’s Behrman Sulks in Vero.” New York Daily News, February 26, 1949.

“Behrman Keeps in Shape As Ebbets Field Laborer.” New York Times, February 9, 1949.

“Behrman to Come Back.” New York Times, June 11, 1948.

“Dodgers Reclaim King.” New York Times, June 15, 1948.

“Giants Release Pitcher Behrman to Oakland Team; Six Rookies Are Dropped.” New York Times, April 2, 1950.

“Henry (Hank) Behrman.” The Sporting News, February 23, 1987.

“Other 28—No Title.” New York Times, September 19, 1948.

“Porterfield Top Pitcher.” New York Times, December 6, 1948.

“Royals Win No-Hitter.” New York Times, April 18, 1948.

“Obituary: Ellen Behrman.” Tampa Tribune, June 14, 2004.

Notes

1. Murphy, Edward T. “Behrman Is a Dodger Sleeper.” New York Sun, February 19, 1946.

2. Murphy, Edward T. “Behrman Is a Dodger Sleeper.” New York Sun, February 19, 1946.

3. McGowen, Roscoe. “33,045 See Dodgers Defeat Braves, 3-1.” New York Times, June 28, 1946.

4. Goren, Herbert. “Behrman Shows Winning Form.” New York Sun, June 29, 1947.

5. Murray, Arch. “Behrman Gets Last Laugh—He’s Back!” New York Post, June 10, 1948.

6. Richman, Milton. “It Was a Year for Throwing Spat Balls.” Baseball Digest, January 1949.

7. Richman, Milton. “It Was a Year for Throwing Spat Balls.” Baseball Digest, January 1949.

8. McGowen, Roscoe. “Dodgers Defeat Pirates, 6-2, 8-6, As Robinson Drives Home 6 Runs.” New York Times, June 25, 1948.

9. Burr, Harold C. “Rickey Picks Winter Job for Behrman as Pick-Shovel Artist.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 9, 1949.

10. Burr, Harold C. “Rickey Picks Winter Job for Behrman as Pick-Shovel Artist.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 9, 1949.

11. “Behrman Keeps in Shape As Ebbets Field Laborer.” New York Times, February 9, 1949.

12. Burr, Harold C. “Rickey Picks Winter Job for Behrman as Pick-Shovel Artist.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 9, 1949.

13. Young, Dick. “No Fatted Calf, Flock’s Behrman Sulks in Vero.” New York Daily News, February 26, 1949.

14. Holmes, Tommy. “King Recrowned by New Pitch.” Baseball Digest, July 1951.

15. McMullen, Loren. “It’s Happy-Go-Behrman.” Baseball Digest, October 1951.

Blades too had a relationship with Rickey, one that dated back to 1919, when the Rickey-managed St. Louis Cardinals traveled to Mount Vernon, Illinois for an exhibition game against the local semipro Carbuilders. Blades, a Mount Vernon native, was at second base for the home team. Francis Raymond Blades had been born there on August 6, 1896, one of eight children of Francis Marion and Mary Magdalene Blades. 

The Cardinals, with Rogers Hornsby in the lineup, were beaten by the scrappy locals, 2–1. Impressed by the Carbuilders’ high-quality play and hustle, Rickey immediately signed three of their players, including Blades, who was twenty-three years old and a veteran of the World War.

The switch-hitting Blades made his professional debut with Memphis of the Southern Association in 1920, and then moved to Houston of the Texas League the following year. He remained with the Buffaloes for two seasons, where at the urging of Rickey he abandoned switch-hitting, and became a right-handed batter exclusively.

Blades was batting a league-leading .330 with Houston when the Cardinals called him up on August 18, 1922. He made his major-league debut the following afternoon at Sportsman’s Park, playing left field and batting sixth. He stroked a single in four at-bats in an 8–7 Cardinals loss to Philadelphia. Playing thirty-seven games in his rookie season, the five-feet-seven, 163-pound Blades batted an even .300. 

Primarily a second baseman, Ray had committed 142 errors in three minor-league campaigns. His uneven fielding at second base and the presence of Rogers Hornsby at the keystone position for St. Louis necessitated a switch. 

Either Rickey or Cardinals coach Burt Shotton suggested to Ray that his best chance to remain with the Cardinals was either at third base or in the outfield. Blades tried the hot corner first: “[Shotton] hit ten balls to me. I missed nine of them, picked up the tenth, and threw it into the stands.”² After that final muff at third, the Cardinals decided that Blades was best suited for the outfield.³

The tragic death of twenty-seven-year-old Cardinals left fielder Austin McHenry in November 1922 created a void at the position for Blades to fill. “No one ever worked longer or harder to stick in the majors [and master outfield play],” wrote Chicago sportswriter Edgar Munzel. “Finally he earned the accolade as one of the finest defensive gardeners in the NL.”⁴ His fielding in left improved to the point where Hornsby would opine in a syndicated column, “I always figured Ray Blades and Ross Youngs . . . as two of the greatest outfielders in the game.”⁵

Blades, who had a career on-base percentage of .395, never changed his hitting philosophy: “Just deaden the ball a little.” After a terrific 1925 season, he was recognized as one of the best leadoff batters in the game. Appearing in 122 games, he batted .342, with a .423 on-base percentage, and a .535 slugging average. During one stretch, he reached base in fifty-four consecutive games. Blades marked another milestone in 1925; in October, he married Ruth Bennett.

On August 17, 1926, a gray, drizzly afternoon in St. Louis, Blades raced toward the left-field wall in an attempt to snare a drive hit by Brooklyn’s Gus Felix. He climbed a recently erected chicken-wire fence strung along the outfield wall and got a spike caught in the mesh fence. Ray had to be helped off the field suffering what was originally reported as a badly bruised kneecap. 

His leg set in a plaster cast, Blades returned home to Illinois. Aside from a pinch-hitting appearance on August 27, he was unable to play again in 1926. That December Blades had surgery on the knee for a series of badly torn ligaments. The operation was a success, though Blades walked with a slight limp for the remainder of his life. 

Ray returned to action in May 1927, but he was never the same player. The surgery had robbed him of much of his speed. Whatever power he had at the plate was gone as well. After a 1928 season, in which he had a mere eighty-five at-bats and hit a career-low .235, Blades spent 1929 back in the minors playing for St. Louis farm clubs in Rochester and Houston. 

The Cardinals signed him as a player-coach for the 1930 season, but there was really nowhere for him to coach; manager Gabby Street was at third and Buzzy Wares was at first. He batted only 101 times during the season, compiling a surprising .396 average. An errant pitch by teammate Wild Bill Hallahan during spring training had shattered the bone in his left foot, necessitating more surgery that December. 

By 1932 Blades knew his days as a big-league player were over. On May 8, there was another collision with the wall at Sportsman’s Park, this time in right field. He played eighty games for St. Louis, more than in any season since 1926, but hit just .229. In 1933 Blades, now thirty-six, took over as manager of the Columbus Redbirds, the Cardinals affiliate in the American Association. As a player-manager, he led the club to Junior World Series championships in 1933 and ’34. 

By 1934 the American Association had suspended Blades three times and fined him even more often, usually for infractions concerning abusive language to umpires. He was suspended again in 1935, this time for encouraging his players to stall in a game against Minneapolis.

After Columbus, Blades managed Rochester in the International League for three years with mixed results. He led the Red Wings to a second-place finish in 1936, a disappointing sixth-place finish in 1937, and a third-place finish in 1938. Then, on November 6, 1938, the Cardinals named Blades to succeed manager Frankie Frisch.

Blades immediately began shaping an unsettled club in his own image. If the rookie pilot had one advantage stepping into the St. Louis managerial reins, it was that at either Columbus or Rochester he had led sixteen members of the current big-league squad. 

Blades’s pitching philosophy, in an era in which pitchers were expected to complete, or nearly complete, their starts, became the most controversial aspect of his managerial style. “[M]y idea is never to save anybody for tomorrow. …. Let’s win today’s game today. . . . Save a man for tomorrow and you may lose two games. I’ll relieve with anyone who can relieve. . . . There won’t be any regular rotation necessarily. . . . In a short series I believe in trying to beat the other club’s best pitcher with my best pitcher. And with all my pitchers if necessary.”⁶ St. Louis’ forty-five complete games were the lowest in the major leagues in 1939. 

The Cardinals won ninety-two games and finished just two games behind Cincinnati. Blades summed up the season philosophically: “We gave ‘em a good fight, didn’t we?”⁷ On November 14, Breadon rewarded him with another one-year pact. 

In 1940 Johnny Mize, Joe Medwick, shortstop Jimmy Brown and his replacement, Marty Marion, and center fielder Terry Moore all suffered injuries. The pitching collapsed and Blades panicked. Going into June, neither Curt Davis nor Mort Cooper had won a single game. The manager began yanking hurlers with abandon: He used eighty-six pitchers in the first thirty games with only six going the distance. St. Louis finished in sixth place, thirteen and a half games behind Cincinnati. 

With the drop in the standings came an expected decrease at the gate. A paid crowd of 7,661 for the June 2 doubleheader against Philadelphia “was one of the smallest Sunday doubleheader crowds in years.”⁸ Sam Breadon took note. The hammer fell on June 7. Breadon made the change without even consulting Rickey, replacing Blades with Billy Southworth, who had succeeded Blades as the manager at Rochester. 

Ray returned home to McLeansboro, Illinois, where he had his first summer vacation in twenty years. Wishing to remain in baseball, he returned to the Southern Association, where his professional baseball career had begun in 1920. In December, he accepted a position as skipper of the league’s New Orleans club, a Dodgers affiliate.

Blades led the Pelicans to a surprising third-place finish in 1941, and then spent 1942 as a coach with the Cincinnati Reds. He resigned after the season and returned to New Orleans, where in 1943 the Pelicans finished first in the season’s second half. After three controversial seasons managing the American Association’s St. Paul Saints, which culminated in his abrupt resignation during the 1946 playoffs, the Dodgers chose him to replace the departed Dressen. 

Blades was “given credit for much of the smart playing by the Dodgers” in 1947.⁹ His baseball experience and acumen added new dimensions to a Brooklyn club devoid of its spiritual leader, Durocher. Regardless of his baseball “smarts,” Blades’ coaching was sometimes criticized while he was with Brooklyn. “Ray Blades unaccountably sent Carl Furillo home [on a ground ball to Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto] where he was a dead pigeon all the way,” wrote Arthur Daley in his game account of 1947 World Series Game Seven, which Brooklyn lost. “[A] sepulchral voice in the press box asked, ‘Is Charlie Dressen still coaching at third?’ It was the nastiest crack of the series.”¹⁰

In August 1948 Blades traded coaching assignments with Jake Pitler; Ray switched to the first base box while Pitler moved to third. In October, Rickey took him off the playing field altogether and named him troubleshooter for the Dodgers’ minor-league system.

Ray remained with Brooklyn, chiefly as a scout, for two more seasons. In November 1950 Marty Marion was named to manage the Cardinals. One of Marion’s first personnel decisions was to hire the fifty-four-year-old Blades, his first major-league manager, as “supervisor” and third-base coach. 

Blades was released from the St. Louis organization for the final time in October 1951, for what owner Fred Saigh described as “economic reasons.” Ray was believed to have been the highest paid of the four Cardinals coaches, a number the owner believed was too many. 

Another round of knee surgery kept Ray out of baseball entirely in 1952, but an old baseball acquaintance was there to bring him back. Wid Matthews, who worked with Blades in New Orleans in 1943, was now personnel director of the Chicago Cubs. Matthews hired Blades to serve as a “coach-scout . . . a sort of personal handyman.” (The “coach-scout” contract would be voided by the commissioner’s office—scouts did not receive pension benefits—and eventually was changed to call for coach’s duties alone.) 

He performed both duties for Chicago, regardless of the wording of his contract, and became the first-ever advance scout for the franchise.¹¹ Ray was among the Chicago brain trust to scout, and highly rate, future Hall of Fame shortstop Ernie Banks. On October 11, 1956 Ray Blades retired from professional baseball at the age of sixty. 

Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich caught up with Blades at the Laurel Park racetrack in Maryland in 1962. Ray was “chauffeuring” the spread-eagle starting gate. “All I do is steer,” the sixty-five-year-old baseball retiree said of his new career. 

Blades remained a visible member of the St. Louis Cardinals family. He was on hand for the thirtieth anniversary of the 1931 champions on the weekend of August 5-6, 1961. In March 1976 the 1926 world champion team was given a golden-anniversary salute by St. Louis writers. Blades, who neither smoked nor drank, and catcher Bob O’Farrell, both seventy-nine years old, were the oldest of the ten surviving team members. Two years later, his high-school baseball uniform was retired. “The greatest baseball man to ever play at McLeansboro High School,” read a plaque in front of Blades’ glass-encased jersey.

Ruth Bennett Blades, Ray’s wife, died on January 30, 1968, in Mount Vernon. They had no children. In 1970, Ray married Ruth Daley Wright. He died on May 18, 1979, at Abraham Lincoln Hospital in Lincoln, Illinois. He was eighty-three years old. In addition to his wife, he was survived by a stepdaughter.

Notes

1. New York Post, April 9, 1947, p. 60.

2. Baseball Digest, December 1966, p. 74.

3. Washington Post, June 12, 1962, p. 18.

4. Sporting News, November 18, 1953, p. 23.

5. Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1927, page A6.

6. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 2, 1939, p. 5A

7. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 29, 1939, p. 1E.

8. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 3, 1940, p. 1B.

9. Sporting News, October 22, 1947, p.15.

10. New York Times, October 7, 1947, p. 47.

11. Sporting News, November 5, 1952, p. 15.

Robert Randall Bragan was born Robert Randall Downs on October 30, 1917, in Birmingham, Alabama, the second son of Walter Lee and Corinne (Roberts) Downs. After Walter died in 1921, Corrine met and married George Washington Bragan, Jr., a widower with two young children. George adopted Corinne’s two sons, Walter Lee, Jr. and Robert, who never considered anyone other than George to be their father.¹ From the tragedy each endured, George and Corinne created a loving, close-knit family that eventually grew to seven sons and two daughters.

The Bragan boys, who worked after school, nonetheless found time to play baseball. Four of them eventually signed professional contracts. Robert, a shortstop, was the best of the lot. After graduating from Phillips High School, he accepted a baseball scholarship to Birmingham’s Howard College, now Samford University, Bragan left after one semester when he was offered $65 a month to play for the Panama City (Florida) Pelicans in the Class D Alabama-Florida League. 

Bobby, five feet eleven and weighing 175 pounds, spent the 1937 season with Panama City, where he hit .285 with 56 runs batted in. Before the start of the next season, the Pelicans sold his contract to the Pensacola (Florida) Pilots of the Class B Southeastern League for $500. A strong-armed, good-fielding shortstop, he batted .298 for Pensacola in 1938. The next season, Bragan hit .311 with twenty-nine doubles, ten triples, and twelve home runs. The Phillies, who had a working agreement with the Pilots, took notice. 

The Phillies bought Bragan’s contract in early 1940 and invited him to spring training. Bobby performed well during the exhibition season, and manager Doc Prothro gave him the starting job with a $2,500 salary. In his memoir, Bobby wrote, “I was lucky in that I was in the right organization at the right time trying to win a job at the right position.”² Bragan, a right-handed batter, was used sparingly to start the season, getting in only as an occasional defensive replacement. But with regular shortstop George Scharein struggling at the plate, Bragan got the start in Pittsburgh on April 30. He played errorless ball and had his first major-league hit, a single off Pirates reliever Ken Heintzleman that scored two runs. From May 9 on he was the Phillies’ regular shortstop for the rest of the season. 

Overall, Bragan batted .222 in 132 games with seven home runs and forty-four runs batted in for the last-place Phillies. Defensively, he had a .936 fielding percentage, lowest among the National League’s regular shortstops. He was an adequate major-league shortstop at best, with a good throwing arm but poor speed. During the offseason life changed for the twenty-three-year-old Bragan. He had been courting Frances Best, known to all as Gwenn, who was still a high school senior. The relationship got serious and the couple married in a secret ceremony on March 2, 1941. The marriage lasted until Gwenn’s death in 1983. 

Bragan played all 154 games at shortstop for the Phillies in 1941. He raised his batting average to .251 with sixty-nine runs batted in, but struggled against curve ball pitchers. Opponents exploited his weakness against the breaking ball and Bragan slumped the following season, hitting just .218 in 109 games. Bobby recognized that he did not have the talent required to succeed in the majors as an infielder, so he volunteered to catch. He caught a full major-league game for the first time on July 30, 1942 and filled in as a part-time shortstop and catcher for the remainder of the season. 

On March 24, 1943 the Phillies sent Bragan to the Brooklyn Dodgers for minor-league pitcher Jack Kraus and an undisclosed amount of cash. While the trade barely registered in the sports pages of the day, it was a seismic event in the life of Bobby Bragan. At Brooklyn’s spring training camp in Bear Mountain, New York, Bragan met the Dodgers’ new president and general manager, Branch Rickey. Bragan later said that no one had a greater impact on his life than Branch Rickey.

With rosters unsettled during the war years, Dodgers manager Leo Durocher used Bragan as both an infielder and a catcher in 1943 and 1944. It was during this time that Bragan decided he wanted to be a manager. “My reasoning was simple,” he explained years later in his memoir. “Even in war ball, so to speak, I couldn’t stay in a major-league starting lineup. Playing at my best, I still was skilled enough only to be a reserve. And when the war was over and the best players got back, marginal players would quickly be cut. My luck was to be playing for Leo, so I could watch the best and learn from him.”³

Though married with two children (son Robert, Jr. was born in 1942 and daughter Gwenn was born the next year), Bragan was called into military service on April 19, 1945, but was not sent overseas. He was discharged in late January 1947, and immediately traveled to Havana, Cuba, where the Dodgers were conducting spring training. Bragan, twenty-nine, had missed two full major-league seasons.

In Havana, Bragan discovered that he would be a teammate of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American major-league player of the twentieth century. Bragan was one of several Dodgers who objected to the presence of Robinson on the Brooklyn club. As Bragan recalled years later, Branch Rickey called all five recalcitrant players into his office, one at a time, and stated that if Robinson was talented enough to make the team, then he would open the season with the Dodgers. “If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Rickey,” replied Bragan, “I’d prefer to be traded to another team.” Rickey then asked if Bragan would play differently if Robinson was his teammate, to which Bragan answered in the negative. “No, sir,” he said, “I’d still play my best.”⁴ This answer seemed to satisfy Rickey, and when the 1947 season began, both Bragan and Robinson were Dodgers.

As the season wore on, Bragan’s attitude changed. He grew to respect Robinson, not only for his playing ability, but also for his courage and dignity in the face of relentless abuse from opposing managers, players and fans. Bragan dropped his trade request, and by the spring of 1948, he and Robinson had formed a friendship that lasted until Robinson’s death in 1972.

Bragan spent the 1947 season as a bullpen catcher and late-inning defensive replacement. He appeared in only twenty-five games, batting .194. In his only appearance in the World Series against the Yankees, he had a pinch-hit double in the sixth inning of Game Six.

Bobby opened the 1948 season with the Dodgers, but in June he was offered a job managing the Fort Worth Cats, Brooklyn’s Class AA farm club in the Texas League. Bragan was thrilled with the offer and accepted immediately. Overall, he had played in nearly 600 big-league games, including 415 at shortstop and 140 as a catcher. His lifetime batting average was .240 with fifteen home runs.⁵

As a player-manager Bragan caught sixty-seven games and hit .274 for the first-place Cats, who went on to win the postseason playoffs and the Texas League championship. They then faced the Birmingham Barons in the Dixie Series, capturing that title as well. In 1949, Fort Worth easily finished first in the regular season but lost in the league finals. 

Bragan managed the Cats for three more seasons, finishing second, fourth, and second. He continued to write his own name on the lineup card most days, playing in 309 games from 1950 through 1952. Bragan maintained that as the catcher he was uniquely positioned to manage the game, especially the pitchers. 

In 1953, Rickey, then the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, tapped Bobby to manage the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League—a club that had won the PCL pennant in 1952. Bragan played in ninety-eight games in 1953, while leading the Stars to their second consecutive pennant. After the season, The Sporting News named him its Minor League Manager of the Year, noting the players were “inspired by Bragan’s fighting leadership.”⁶ After Hollywood finished second in 1954 and third in 1955, Rickey hired Bragan to manage the Pirates for 1956. 

The Pirates were loaded with talent, most of it still raw, and Bragan was determined to mold it in the “Rickey-Durocher” image. Mostly, it didn’t work. Future Hall of Famers Bill Mazeroski and Roberto Clemente were at least two seasons away from All Star status. Shortstop Dick Groat especially did not thrive under Bragan’s caustic comments and frequent fines; the future National League MVP considered quitting baseball more than once during Bragan’s tenure as skipper. Pittsburgh finished seventh in 1956 and was on its way to another seventh-place finish in 1957, when GM Joe L. Brown fired Bragan in August. Bobby later admitted that he had tried too hard, was too much of a taskmaster and perfectionist, and was not the right manager for the Pirates of the late 1950s. 

Hank Greenberg, general manager of the Cleveland Indians, hired Bragan to lead the Indians in 1958, but two weeks after the hiring Greenberg was fired and replaced by Frank Lane. Bragan was dismissed after only three months and later recalled that Lane broke the news by saying, “I don’t know how we’ll get along without you, Bobby, but starting tomorrow we’re going to try.”⁷

For the 1959 season, the forty-one-year-old Bragan returned to the Dodgers organization as manager of the PCL Spokane Indians. Ever the teacher, Bragan had a particularly beneficial effect on twenty-six-year-old Maury Wills, who was about to start his ninth year in the minor leagues. Bobby turned him into a switch-hitter and encouraged him to use his speed to steal bases. By 1962, Wills was the National League’s Most Valuable Player. 

In 1960 Bragan joined the Los Angeles Dodgers as the third-base coach under Walton Alston. After the season Gabe Paul, general manager of the expansion franchise in Houston, offered Bobby the farm director position. Bragan’s dream was to someday manage the Dodgers, but the gravitational pull from Texas, where he and Gwenn still lived, was too great and Bobby accepted Paul’s offer. 

Bragan enjoyed the challenge of building a farm system and scouting for talent in 1961, but by 1962, after a disagreement with the owner, Gabe Paul quit and was replaced by Paul Richards. Bobby spent a miserable 1962 as Houston’s bullpen coach. The move to Houston, he later claimed, was the biggest mistake of his baseball life.

When Milwaukee offered Bragan $35,000 to manage in 1963, he wasted little time accepting. The Braves were fresh off a fifth-place finish in 1962, but Bragan’s style did not wear well in Milwaukee, and the club slipped to sixth place in 1963 before finishing fifth again in 1964. As lame ducks in Milwaukee in 1965, the Braves team endured a very angry fan base and critical press corps. The Braves won eighty-six games despite a season full of problems. Bragan considered it his finest managerial effort. It was Bragan who persuaded twenty-six-year-old Phil Niekro to go back to the minors in 1966 to develop his knuckleball.

The Braves, in their first season in Atlanta, led the league in runs scored, but their pitching was weak, and Bragan was fired in August. Beginning in 1969, Bragan served seven seasons as president of the Texas League, a post that allowed him to continue living in his adopted hometown of Fort Worth.

Ever the innovator, Bragan brought the designated hitter to his league in the early 1970s, and then as a member of the Baseball Rules Committee was instrumental in instituting the Designated Hitter in the American League in 1973. He also called for interleague play, synthetic grass at all stadiums and more domes. A three-year stint as president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues followed, after which Bragan, at the age of sixty-one, became an assistant to Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. 

Four years later Bragan took a post in public relations for the Texas Rangers. He worked in that capacity until he was well past his eightieth birthday, giving speeches and making public appearances on behalf of the team. Bragan was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 1980, the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981, and the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 2005. Also in 2005, at the age of eighty-seven, Bragan managed his former team, the Fort Worth Cats, for one day, surpassing Connie Mack as the oldest manager in the history of professional baseball. As late as 2009, Bragan was listed as a special assistant for community relations in the Texas Rangers front office. 

Bragan and Gwenn had been married for forty-two years when she died in 1983. On March 27, 1985, Bobby married Roberta L. Beckman; the happy marriage lasted until Roberta died in 1993. Bragan continued in his role as chairman and CEO of the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation, going to the office at least three days a week. 

Bobby Bragan died in Fort Worth, Texas at age ninety-two on January 21, 2010. He is buried in Fort Worth’s Greenwood Memorial Park.

Sources

Bragan, Bobby, and Jeff Guinn. You Can’t Hit the Ball With the Bat on Your Shoulder: The Baseball Life and Times of Bobby Bragan. (Fort Worth: The Summit Group, 1992.

Duvall, Bob. “Whatever Became Of —,” Baseball Digest, February 1971.

Bragan Hits 2 Homers; Phils Beat Reds, 3-1.” Chicago Daily Tribune. June 19, 1940, p. 25.

Edgar G. Brands, “Perini, Stengel Majors’ Top Men.” Sporting News. December 30, 1953.

Effrat, Louis. “Giants Bow To Phils, 11-2, 6-5; Losing Streak

Now Six Straight.” New York Times. September 3, 1940, p. 23

“Jimmy Bragan Dies.” Birmingham (Alabama) News. June 3, 2001, p.1.

“Phils Top Reds, 4-2, As Bragan Stars.” New York Times. July 31, 1942, p. 19.

“About Bobby Bragan.” Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation. http://www.bobbybragan.org: 2009.

“Ancestry World Tree Project.” Ancestry.com

Alabama. Jefferson County. 1910 U.S. Census, population.

Alabama. Jefferson County. 1920 U.S. Census, population.

Alabama. Jefferson County. 1930 U.S. Census, population

Bedingfield, Gary. “Bobby Bragan.” Baseball in Wartime. http://www.baseballinwartime.com/player_biographies/bragan_bobby.htm: 2009.

“World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918.” Database and images. Ancestry.com. http://www.ancestry.com: 2009.

Maurice Bouchard phone interview with Bobby Bragan, January 15, 2010.

Fred Claire, “Bragan an Ageless Wonder,” interview with Bobby Bragan, mlb.com, August 18, 2005.

Debb Harris, designer. “Bobby Bragan.” Texas Baseball Hall of Fame.2009.

Notes

1. Research into the Bragan and Downs families was conducted by Maurice Bouchard, using the 1910 and 1920 United States Census; the information was confirmed in a phone interview with Bobby Bragan on January 14, 2010.

2. Bobby Bragan and Jeff Guinn, You Can’t Hit the Ball With the Bat on Your Shoulder, p. 55.

3. Bobby Bragan and Jeff Guinn, You Can’t Hit the Ball With the Bat on Your Shoulder, p. 112.

4. Bobby Bragan and Jeff Guinn, You Can’t Hit the Ball With the Bat on Your Shoulder, pp. 3-4.

5, Statistics found at Baseball Reference web site.

6. Sporting News, December 30, 1953.

7. Bobby Bragan and Jeff Guinn, You Can’t Hit the Ball With the Bat on Your Shoulder, p 229.

Branca’s father, John Branca, came to America from Italy as a child with his family in 1888. Ralph was named after his grandfather, Raffaele, who took the name Ralph in the United States. Ralph’s mother was Katherine Berger, who was born in Hungary. Katherine and John married on October 17, 1902. At various times, John was a trolley conductor, a machinist, and a barber.³

Ralph married Ann Mulvey in 1951. She was a New York girl from a prominent family. Her parents, James and Dearie Mulvey, owned a share of the Dodgers and her maternal grandfather, Steve McKeever, had been president of the Brooklyn club.⁴ At the end of his playing career Branca was offered an opportunity to stay in baseball as a pitching coach for Los Angeles in the Pacific Coast League, “But I just didn’t want to go to California,” he said in a 2008 interview. 

Instead, Branca became a financial executive in and around New York City, work he found satisfying. “When you can hand somebody a check for $300,000 in 1961 based on a life insurance policy her husband had purchased from me, you feel good. You feel like you’ve had a positive effect on that person’s life.” He later combined his baseball prominence, his financial acumen, and his desire to help others when he ran the Manhattan-based Baseball Assistance Team (BAT) for seventeen years, an organization formed to help those who had had careers in baseball but were facing difficult financial circumstances in their post-baseball lives.⁵ His daughter Mary married former New York Mets manager Bobby Valentine in 1977, and his other daughter, Patricia, also made a life in New York.

As a Brooklyn Dodger, the 6-foot-3, 220-pound right-hander was involved in two of the biggest moments in baseball history, which were also prominent moments in the fabric of American culture. One was the integration of baseball by Jackie Robinson in 1947, and the other was as the man who threw the pitch hit for a home run by Bobby Thomson that won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants. In 1947 the 21-year-old Branca became the second youngest National Leaguer to win twenty games.⁶

The Brooklyn club signed Branca out of New York University in 1943, when he was just 17 years old. He had played both baseball and basketball for NYU. The Dodgers sent him to Olean (New York) their affiliate in the Class D Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York League, where he split ten decisions. Branca was promoted to the Montreal Royals of the International League, Brooklyn’s top farm team, in 1944. He had a 4-5 record for the Royals, when the Dodgers called him up on June 7. Five days later, he made his major-league debut, allowing two hits in three and a third innings of a 15–9 loss to the Giants. Branca split the 1945 season between Brooklyn and St. Paul of the American Association, but spent all of 1946 with the Dodgers. He won only three games but pitched very well in September and was Brooklyn’s starter in Game One of the playoffs against St. Louis. His combined record for his first three seasons with the Dodgers was a mediocre 8-9.

By 1947 the Dodgers were one of the most prominent franchises in baseball. Brooklyn had drawn nearly 1.8 million fans to Ebbets Field in 1946 and would inch over that figure in 1947. The Dodgers had lost a playoff to St. Louis for the 1946 pennant and were considered a strong contender for the 1947 flag. Their most visible newcomer was Jackie Robinson, the International League’s Most Valuable player in 1946. 

“As I look back, I’m proud that I was tight with Jackie,” Branca said. “He was a great competitor and a great teammate. The timing of bringing him to team was perfect. I’ve always been proud that baseball integration beat the government’s integration by seven years and that I was a part of it. My friendship with Jackie continued after baseball. We played golf together and we both worked in Manhattan and saw each other a lot while he was with Chock Full o’ Nuts.” 

As Branca saw it, Robinson’s acceptance by the Dodgers was directly related to their recognition of his ability to help the team win. “Some saw it right away, for others, it took until the middle of the year, but by the second half of the season everyone saw it. We all wanted the glory of the World Series, and it was pretty clear we weren’t going to get there without Jack.” 

According to Branca, the Southern culture that prevailed in baseball clubhouses at the time was not an issue for the Dodgers. “Once we knew he belonged, it was fine,” he said. The opposition was a different story. “Jackie was helping to beat them, and they were mad.” 

The 1947 season was the high point of Branca’s major-league career. His 21 wins, second-best in the league, were nearly a quarter of his lifetime total of 88. He also led the National League in starts and was second in strikeouts and third in earned run average.⁷ Branca was chosen as an All-Star but did not appear in the game. He was the starter and loser in Game One of the World Series against the Yankees, and appeared twice more in relief, picking up a win in Game Six.

In 1948 Branca’s win total dropped to 14 and his ERA went up by nearly a run, to 3.51. “I was 12-5 at the [All-Star] break in 1948 [Actually, he was 10-6.]. Then, a couple of my, shall we say, lower IQ teammates, were playing burnout by throwing the ball to each other as hard as they could trying to hurt each other’s hands. One of the throws got away and hit me in the shin. The leg swelled and it turned into an infected bone lining. I spent three weeks in the hospital with periosteomyelitis and only got two wins [actually four] in the second half.”⁸

According to Branca, the bone infection settled in his shoulder and he could not throw as hard through 1949 and 1950. Nevertheless, he was 13-5 in ’49 and led the league in winning percentage, though his ERA climbed to 4.39.⁹ By 1950 manager Burt Shotton used him mostly in relief, and Branca remembers that season, in which he went 7-9, as “a waste.” He was little help as the Dodgers lost the pennant to Philadelphia on the last day of the regular season. 

As 1951 started, things were looking up for Branca. The Dodgers were in first place for most of the year, and “by throwing in the bullpen every day my arm started to get stronger.” He made his first start that year on May 28, and after throwing a two-hit shutout against the Pirates on August 27, his record was 12-5. 

But September and October were difficult for Branca and the Dodgers. He started six games the Dodgers lost, as his record for the season dropped to 13-12.¹⁰ The Dodgers had a thirteen-game lead after an August 11 doubleheader and played a little over .500 the rest of the way.¹¹ The Giants, meanwhile, went 37-7 down the stretch, caught the Dodgers on the last weekend, and beat them in a playoff culminated by the famous “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” home run off Branca by Bobby Thomson.¹²

In January 2001, Joshua Prager, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, published the details of a sign-stealing scheme the Giants rigged in the Polo Grounds, their home ballpark. The scheme involved a telescope from windows in the center-field clubhouse, a buzzer rigged under dirt in the bullpen, and a reserve catcher positioning his body and equipment to tip off the batter as to which pitch was coming. Prager’s story confirmed for the public what Branca had been told by his Detroit Tigers roommate Ted Gray in 1953. Gray was friends with Giants reserve outfielder Earl Rapp and was told the story. Branca said Thomson knew what was coming on October 3, 1951, and while he still had to hit it, the information was certainly useful.¹³

“I begrudge the Giants the 1951 pennant,” Branca said emphatically in the 2008 interview. “They deprived our owner of money he deserved, they deprived our fans of the joy of a pennant winner, and they deprived my teammates and me of the fame and glory that comes from playing in the World Series. What the Giants did was despicable. It involved an electronic buzzer. No one else used that. Sometimes you could see people in the center-field scoreboard in Chicago or wherever using towels to give signals and you could do something about it. The buzzer was undetectable, and it was wrong.”

Branca kept the story essentially to himself until Prager’s article appeared.¹⁴ He appeared with Thomson on television and at autograph shows, and generally played the role of good sport for half a century. The two ex-players thrown together by fate became close friends; a friendship that Branca said became strained after Prager’s public exposure of the Giants’ scheme.¹⁵

The sign-stealing revelations and the reactions to those revelations “affected my relationship with Bob. We’re not as close. We haven’t done a card show in two years, and we don’t talk as often,” Branca said. “Part of that might be that he moved down South,” Branca allowed. “He was one of the soldiers; he wasn’t one of the leaders. Still, he okayed it, and he used it.”

Branca said he was especially disappointed in Giants captain Alvin Dark and former teammate Eddie Stanky. An observant Catholic, Branca said he took umbrage because Dark and Stanky claimed to be very religious. Most of his vitriol, though, was aimed at Giants owner Horace Stoneham, manager Leo Durocher, and coach Herman Franks, the man in the clubhouse with the telescope. “They were the generals,” Branca said.

Thomson’s home run, regardless of the circumstances, was the beginning of a steep downhill slide in Branca’s baseball career. In spring training of 1952 he fell off a chair while playing Monopoly in the clubhouse and landed on a Coke bottle.¹⁶ Branca said that threw his back out of alignment, a situation that still plagued him a half-century later. “Our trainer was an osteopath, which was basically a chiropractor with two years of medical school, and he didn’t think to check my alignment,” sighed Branca. “Using a lift might have helped me then.” In later years, Branca turned to using lifts in his shoes to cope with the effects of his 1952 accident.

As it was, Branca appeared in only 16 games for the 1952 Dodgers, none in a World Series loss to the Yankees. On July 10, 1953, the American League’s last-place Detroit Tigers claimed him after he was waived out of the National League.¹⁷ “The Detroit trainer worked hard on me, but he didn’t check my alignment either,” Branca remembered. “The state of sports medicine was nothing like it is today.” Branca went 7-10 in thirty-four games over parts of two seasons with the Tigers before receiving his release in July 1954.¹⁸

Later in 1954, Branca called the Yankees to pitch batting practice. Manager Casey Stengel and pitching coach Jim Turner were impressed enough to activate him, and he went 1-0 in five games.¹⁹ Branca went to spring training in 1955 with the Minneapolis Millers, the top minor league affiliate of the Giants. He hurt his arm while pitching nine innings in a spring training game but said he didn’t tell the trainer. Millers manager Bill Rigney let Branca go when he was ineffective in subsequent outings. 

Thinking his career was over, Branca said, he accepted an invitation to Old Timers Day at Yankee Stadium in 1956, and discovered while preparing for that game that his velocity had returned. He contacted Dodgers general manager Buzzie Bavasi, and spent the last month of the 1956 season with Brooklyn. He made one appearance, on September 7, and in two innings allowed one hit and two walks and struck out two.²⁰

Branca accompanied the team on its postseason tour of Japan and hurt his arm again — he said manager Walter Alston did not allow him sufficient time to warm up before a relief appearance. The Dodgers invited him to spring training in 1957, but he failed to make the team. The Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League offered Branca a coaching job that he turned down, ending his baseball career.

While Branca seemed to harbor some bitterness over how his career ended, Bavasi said in 2006 that he did not intend for Branca to pitch much in his last stint with the team. “I brought him in not to pitch, but in order for him to retire as a Dodger,” Buzzie said. It seems that the team and the player were not on the same page regarding expectations, or that time had clouded memories.

Ralph and his wife Ann lived in the same country club community in Rye, New York, since the middle 1960s. Branca sang publicly and earned praise for his strong baritone. He was also a devoted poet and held the record for 17 consecutive wins on the television game show Concentration.²¹ He was personally and financially successful, and was one of the most famous baseball players of his era, even if he felt his pitching potential was largely unrealized due to a series of negative circumstances. He was through as a ballplayer as he turned 30, but in his decade in the big leagues, he bore witness and directly participated in two of the most famous baseball events of the twentieth century.

Branca died at the age of 90 on November 23, 2016.

Sources

All quotes by Ralph Branca are from an interview with the author on September 29, 2008; quotes from Buzzie Bavasi are from an e-mail exchange on October 26, 2006.

Notes

1. Joshua Prager, The Echoing Green, New York: Pantheon Books, 2006: p. 118.

2. Joshua Prager, The Echoing Green, New York: Pantheon Books, 2006: p. 127.

3. ancestry.com, US Census (1910, 1920, 1930).

4. Bob McGee, The Greatest Ballpark Ever. Piscataway, New Jersey: Rivergate Books, 2005: p. 120.

5. Jon Heyman, Sports Illustrated, October 3, 2006.

6. Christy Mathewson was several months younger than Branca when he won 20 games for the 1901 New York Giants. Since then, Dwight Gooden, with the 1985 Mets, became the youngest ever to win 20 games.

7. Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia: p. 1846.

8. The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery does not list periosteomyelitis. Branca’s disorder may have been osteomyelitis.

9. Retrosheet

10. Ibid

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Jon Heyman, Sports Illustrated, October 3, 2006.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Baseball-reference

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Jon Heyman, Sports Illustrated, October 3, 2006.

But the Dodgers could not send him to the minor leagues under the rules then in force. Because Brown already had two years on a big-league roster, he would have to pass through waivers to be farmed out. The Dodgers were not willing to let Brown go for the waiver price, so he was relegated to end-of-the-bench status.

For the ‘47 season, the youngster appeared in only fifteen games, including six at third base, three in the outfield, and one at shortstop. The right-handed-hitting Brown even suffered the ignominy of starting a game at third base against a left-handed pitcher but, when the Dodgers knocked the southpaw out of the game in the first inning before he had a chance to bat, being replaced by the left-handed-hitting Spider Jorgensen. 

Brown had made quite a splash when he was first called up to the Dodgers on August 3, 1944. With Pee Wee Reese still in the military, the Dodgers had tried Bobby Bragan at shortstop, but decided they needed someone more mobile. GM Branch Rickey and manager Leo Durocher remembered Brown from spring training and called him up from the Newport News (Virginia) Builders of the Class B Piedmont League. When Brown arrived in the clubhouse, Durocher told him he was playing shortstop that afternoon in a doubleheader against the Cubs. Brown advised Durocher that he had ridden the train all night, but Leo responded that he didn’t care.

Brown did play the doubleheader, although he was only sixteen years and seven months old. He thus became the youngest position player to appear in a Major League game and the second youngest ever, after Joe Nuxhall, who appeared as a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds earlier in 1944.

Tommy Brown was a local kid; he was born December 6, 1927, in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. He never knew his father and was raised primarily by an aunt and uncle. He quit school at a young age to work with his uncle unloading barges on the docks of New York. Brown spent his free time playing baseball on the pavement and cobblestone streets and in the famous Brooklyn Parade Grounds. The Dodgers held open tryouts there in 1943 and a friend who played first base on Tommy’s team talked Brown into going with him. They joined about 2,500 other kids and Brown arrived without a glove or spikes, items he did not own. After three days the Dodgers told him and a handful of others that they would hear from the team. Brown was only fifteen years old. Over the winter, the club offered him a chance to attend spring training in Bear Mountain, New York. His “bonus” was the 25-cent fee for the ferry. Brown showed enough promise in spring training to be offered $75 a month to play for the Dodgers’ Class D Pony League farm club in Olean, New York. But Jake Pitler, manager of the Class B Newport News team, claimed him, which meant Brown would earn $125 a month. Tommy was barely sixteen when the season opened, but he proceeded to bat .297 in ninety-one games before his call-up by the Dodgers. He also led the league in triples, with eleven, and socked twenty-one doubles. Brooklyn president Branch Rickey called Brown “the second best prospect in our chain and a veritable Pepper Martin.”

When manager Pitler told Brown he was being called up to Brooklyn, he received a surprising response. Tommy told Pitler that he did not want to go but wanted to finish the year with Newport News because he was hitting well and learning so much. But Pitler said, “No, you’ve got to leave right now.”

Brown faced left-hander Bob Chipman of the Cubs in his debut with the Dodgers. In his first at bat he grounded out, but later, in the seventh inning, slugged a double to left-center. It was in the field, however, that Brown’s nervousness was apparent. He let a routine ground ball by Chipman roll through his legs and in the brief infield practice before each inning in the field, had the fans behind first base scurrying for cover as he unleashed throws that not even six-feet-seven first baseman Howie Schultz could reach. Brown had quickly lived up to his nickname, Buckshot, which Durocher had given him in spring training because of his scatter arm.

In spite of Brown’s shakiness afield and being largely overmatched at the plate, Durocher played him often at shortstop for the rest of the season. Brown finished his rookie campaign with a puny .164 batting average. Still he managed to make contact most of the time, striking out only seventeen times in 160 plate appearances. In the field, he made sixteen errors, mostly on errant throws.

Brown’s boyhood hero was Joe DiMaggio, and early in his career he affected DiMag’s widespread stance. At six feet one and 175 pounds, he even physically resembled DiMaggio. Although no one called Brown a future DiMaggio, Tommy was considered a baseball prodigy because of his youth.

Although Reese was still in the navy in 1945, the Dodgers decided to send Brown to the St. Paul Saints of the American Association for some much-needed seasoning. Tommy again performed well, batting a solid .286 in eighty-five games, with ten home runs. That prompted the Dodgers to recall him in mid-July for the stretch run. Brooklyn was in the pennant race and had decided that Eddie Basinski could not cover enough ground to play shortstop every day. For the last two months of the season, Brown became the regular shortstop and did a commendable job, hitting .245 in 196 at-bats. He clubbed his first big league home run on August 20 against the Pirates’ Preacher Roe in a losing cause.

Tommy was only seventeen years old when he hit that first home run. Five days later, he connected for another circuit blast off Adrian Zabala of the New York Giants. As a result, he is both the youngest and second youngest player ever to homer in a Major League game. 

Brown remained plagued by inconsistency in the field, both throwing and catching the ball. He once threw a ball to first base that landed in the upper deck. Another time, a ground ball went right through his legs. Tommy, however, continued as if he had caught the ball and made a phantom throw to first baseman Schultz, who stretched as if he were going to catch the throw. The only problem was that they fooled Dodgers left fielder Augie

Galan, who didn’t see the ball roll by him. The batter circled the bases and Brown was charged with a four-base error. 

After the 1945 season Tommy joined fifteen other Major Leaguers on a barnstorming trip to Manila, Tokyo, and stops in the South Pacific to entertain troops by playing against service teams and holding evening bull sessions about baseball. 

Major Leaguers returned from military service in droves in 1946, but Brown, now eighteen, was going against the grain. He was drafted into the Army in February after returning from his barnstorming tour. He was discharged in early April 1947 to find Pee Wee Reese holding down shortstop once again and a glut of talent at third base. As a result, Brown played in only fifteen games, mostly in the outfield or as a pinch hitter. He did not appear in the World Series. Manager Durocher was trying to win a pennant and had little time or patience for the development of the raw talent that was Tommy Brown.

Although 1946 and 1947 were pretty much lost years for Brown, he was still only twenty years old and reported to spring training in 1948 with high hopes. Branch Rickey was still enthralled by Brown’s potential and was quoted shortly after the ‘47 season as saying, “Brown is liable to play 154 games for us next year. At what position, we can’t be sure. Maybe third base, maybe the outfield, maybe even first base.”Tommy did receive more playing time in 1948, mostly at third base, but found himself in crusty Burt Shotton’s doghouse. The sixty-three-year-old Shotton had managed the Dodgers in 1947, following Leo Durocher’s one-year suspension. Durocher returned in ’48, but when he left in mid-July to take over as manager of the Giants, Shotton returned. Shotton became unhappy with Brown when Tommy bowed out of a game with what Shotton believed was a minor finger injury. For his part, Brown never knew where he stood with Shotton, even though he played thereafter with illness or injury.

In 1948 Tommy became known as the one o’clock batting champion, a reference to his prodigious hitting in batting practice. For the year Tommy hit 162 batting practice homers in Ebbets Field. He hit only two in fifty-four games and 156 at bats that counted, however. He still had difficulty making solid contact in real competition. Brown batted just .241 for the season. He also had a run-in with his roommate, Carl Furillo. Although the Dodgers hushed up the story, Furillo and Brown got into a fight over an incident in their hotel room. Furillo got much the better of it, and Brown ended up in the hospital. 

Although his batting average improved to .303 in 1949, Brown remained a part-time player and pinch hitter, appearing in forty-one games with ninety-five at bats. He made his only World Series appearances in ‘49, batting twice as a pinch hitter. The next season, 1950, was a virtual repeat of 1949. In forty-eight games and ninety-eight plate appearances, Brown had twenty-seven hits, including eight home runs, for a .291 average. He also led the National League with seven pinch hits.Tommy had his biggest day in the big leagues on September 18, 1950, against the Cubs at Ebbets Field. Batting leadoff, he singled off Paul Minner. He then homered off Minner in the third inning. In the fifth, he again smacked a home run, this time against reliever Monk Dubiel. Dubiel was still pitching in the eighth inning when Brown hit his third home run of the afternoon to cap a 4-for-4 day. 

Heading into the 1951 season Brown was both a seasoned veteran of the big leagues and a perennial prospect. He was still just twenty-three years old but had six years of Major League experience. New manager Charlie Dressen had high hopes for Tommy and intended for him to play left field. Dressen said he wanted to find a position for Brown because “[i]f that kid can play anything like 150 games, it’s a cinch that he will hit at least thirty-five home runs. You’ve got to love that swing he takes at the ball.”

But once the season began, Brown again had trouble making solid contact. Finally, on June 8, the Dodgers gave up on Tommy’s ever fulfilling his potential and traded him to the Phillies for spare outfielder Dick Whitman and cash. At the time, Brown was hitting just .160 with four hits (and no home runs) in twenty-four at bats. He became a semi-regular with Philadelphia, bouncing between the outfield, second base, and first base. He appeared in seventy-eight games after the trade, hitting only .219, but slugging a promising ten home runs.

Brown was once again lauded as a serious outfield candidate heading into the 1952 season. When camp opened, manager Eddie Sawyer pulled Brown aside and told him that left field was his if he could hit enough to hold it.

Brown could not. He was struggling along with four hits in twenty-nine at bats when the Phillies pulled the plug on June 15, selling him to the Chicago Cubs. Once again, the change of scenery was to Tommy’s liking. He parlayed himself into almost an everyday player, hitting .320 for the Cubs in sixty-one games. The Cubs even played Brown at shortstop for thirty-nine games, a position he had not played for seven years.

Brown began 1953 as the frontrunner for the Cubs’ shortstop position, but he could not keep up his excellent stick work of 1952. He languished below .200 for most of the year and watched as Roy Smalley and Eddie Miksis shared the shortstop position. Brown was again a part-time player, and though his baseball career was far from over, he had played his last Major League game at the age of twenty-five.Tommy landed with the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League for 1954, holding down third base while batting .263 in 152 games. He began the 1955 season with the Angels but after twenty-four games he was sold to the Nashville Vols in the Southern Association. There he took over third base and hit a solid .299. 

At Nashville in 1956, Brown received some national publicity when against the Pelicans in New Orleans he went 4-for-4, 3-for-3, and 3-for-3 in a three-game series. He also had six walks in the series, thus reaching base in sixteen consecutive at-bats. When the club returned home to Nashville, Brown walked four straight times, meaning that he had reached base twenty times in a row.

He was voted to the Southern Association All-Star team but, more importantly, was purchased by the Cincinnati Reds on July 15. However when he arrived on the train from Nashville, Tommy couldn’t lift his right arm above his shoulder. He had apparently landed on the shoulder a couple of weeks earlier when diving for a ball against the Atlanta Crackers. As a result the Reds quickly sent him back to the Southern Association. Brown finished the year in Nashville, batting an impressive .316 with ten home runs and eighty-five runs batted in. His stellar year earned him an invitation to the 1957 Chicago White Sox spring training in Tampa, Florida. But when the season began, he was back playing third base in Nashville, where he slumped to .256 in 139 games.

He returned to Nashville for the 1958 season, before shifting to the Chattanooga Lookouts in the same league after the Washington Senators organization acquired him. For the year, he hit .266 with eight home runs. He split 1959 between Chattanooga and New Orleans, batting .259. Although he was only thirty-one, Brown was tired of life in the minor leagues and retired after that season.

Brown had married a woman from Nashville and so stayed in the area after his playing career, working at the Ford Glass Plant for thirty-five years, before retiring in 1993.

He died at the age of 97 on January 15, 2025, in Altamonte Springs, Florida.

Sources

Roberts, Robin and C. Paul Rogers III. The Whiz Kids and the 1950 Pennant. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. 

Traughber, Bill. “Tommy Brown Recalls His Career,” SABRgraphs, September 24, 2009.

Tommy Brown clippings file, Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

Some apprehension remained. Brooklyn had lost three consecutive games, allowing three chances to nail down the National League championship slip through their fingers. The Dodgers were idle this Monday. The St. Louis Cardinals, their closest competitors, were playing a doubleheader at home against the Chicago Cubs. At Casey’s joint, a group of Dodgers players and their wives huddled in a booth and anxiously awaited results of the nightcap from St. Louis. 

Finally, close to midnight, the tavern’s manager happily announced the final score from St. Louis: Cubs 6, Cardinals 3. All hell broke loose, not only at Casey’s, but on the streets of Flatbush as well. An impromptu party broke out on Flatbush Avenue. Led by an unnamed accordion player, Dodgers players and their wives formed a conga line that joyously marched down Brooklyn’s major thoroughfare. The inn’s proprietor, Hugh Casey, quietly beamed and joined in the merriment.  

Hugh Thomas Casey was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on October 14, 1913. He was the youngest of seven children (five boys, two girls) born to James Oliver Casey, a Fulton County police captain, and Elizabeth Casey. Young Hugh had already gained some notoriety as a hard-throwing teenage pitcher when he first encountered Wilbert Robinson, the legendary former Brooklyn manager. The two met in the early 1930s at Dover Hall, a former plantation just outside Brunswick, Georgia, that served as a hunting and drinking retreat for vacationing Northerners like Robinson. Robby immediately took a liking to the big Georgian—more at first for his hunting prowess than his ability on a baseball diamond—and hired Hugh as a sort of aide de camp. 

Casey’s baseball talents soon became obvious to the ex-catcher when he noticed the oversized teen tossing rocks at empty whiskey bottles precariously balanced on fences. Robinson noted the pitcher’s superior velocity and pinpoint control; he threw hard and never seemed to miss hitting a bottle. Knowing a big-league prospect when he saw one, Robby took Hugh under his wing, encouraging and coaching him. 

The Detroit Tigers signed Casey after he graduated from high school in 1931. In May 1932, after a brief stay in the Detroit system, in which he never appeared in a game, the Tigers dropped him. By 1934 Casey was pitching with his local team, the Southern Association’s Atlanta Crackers. It was his second go-around with the Crackers; he had unsuccessfully debuted with them as an eighteen-year-old two seasons earlier. In 1933 Casey logged a 19-9 mark for the Charlotte Hornets of the Class B Piedmont League, and he returned to his hometown with renewed confidence. 

In 1934 the Crackers’ new president was Casey’s old mentor, Wilbert Robinson. Cincinnati Reds general manager Larry MacPhail was in Atlanta on a scouting trip and Robinson suggested to MacPhail that he sign Casey. MacPhail passed on Casey, but shortly thereafter the Chicago Cubs drafted him. 

Casey spent the entire 1935 season with Chicago, but saw little action. “Sometimes I think [manager] Charlie Grimm never knew I was with the club. . . . I knew every blade of grass in every bullpen throughout the league,” Casey recalled.³ In his major-league debut, on April 29, he pitched two and two-thirds scoreless innings in a wild 12–11 victory over Pittsburgh at Wrigley Field. The official scorer ruled Casey the winning pitcher, but National League president Ford Frick later overruled that decision. The hard-throwing right-hander ended his rookie campaign having thrown only twenty-five and two-thirds innings in thirteen games, with an 0-0 record and a 3.86 earned run average. He was not included on the Cubs’ World Series roster, though he received a full share of World Series money. 

Grimm sent Casey to Los Angeles of the Pacific Coast League the following March. Hugh hurt his arm while with the Angels and lost a great deal of velocity on his fastball. Forced to adapt, he quickly developed what he called a “splitter” to complement his excellent curveball; skeptics later claimed that Casey’s new pitch could be more accurately described by simply eliminating the “l.”  

Toiling as a starter, Casey spent the next three seasons in the minors perfecting his craft and reinventing himself on the mound. In 1937, with Birmingham, he led the Southern Association with a 2.56 ERA. Ignoring concerns about Casey’s weight—he was six feet one but weighed well over 200 pounds— Brooklyn drafted him off the Memphis Chicks roster following the 1938 season.⁴

“He knows how to pitch,” determined new Dodgers skipper Leo Durocher after observing Casey in spring training in 1939.⁵ In his first starting assignment, on May 30, Casey drew as his opponent New York Giants’ ace Carl Hubbell. Before a crowd of nearly 59,000 at the Polo Grounds, Casey outpitched the future Hall of Famer, 3–1. 

He finished the 1939 campaign 15-10 for a third-place Dodgers team, working mostly as a starter. At the time, Casey’s pitching repertoire consisted of a “sneaky fast” hard one, a pitch quicker than it appeared when juxtaposed with his superior curve, and his “splitter.” “He has a head on him—and he has heart,” said Durocher. “You won’t see him flinch in the jam.”⁶

On July 19, 1940, at Wrigley Field, with the Cubs enjoying a big lead, Casey entered the game in the eighth inning and plunked Cubs pitcher Claude Passeau between the shoulder blades. The enraged Passeau immediately hurled his bat toward the pitcher’s mound. Casey started toward the plate, but Brooklyn’s Joe Gallagher got there first and began pummeling Passeau. A full-scale brawl ensued, with the police required to intervene. This was far from the last time that Casey, who more than once admitted, “I’m a mean man on the mound,” would hurl a pitch in anger.⁷

Less than a year later, on May 19, 1941, Passeau got his revenge by connecting on a Casey fastball for a second-inning grand slam. Casey, who was the starting pitcher that afternoon, later claimed that the incident marked the start of his career as a reliever. After Passeau’s home run, manager Durocher stormed out to the mound to make a pitching change, screaming at his shell-shocked hurler, “You’re in the bullpen for the rest of your life.”⁸

Casey remained in the rotation until mid-July, but Durocher finally made the switch, and Casey finally found his true niche. In nineteen relief appearances between July 29 and the conclusion of the ’41 campaign, Casey posted a 2.23 ERA as the Dodgers stormed to their first pennant since 1920. Averaging two-plus innings-pitched per outing, the moon-faced reliever took the hill in six of the Dodgers’ ten contests between August 16 and 23. He finished the final ten games in which he appeared that September. “We couldn’t have won without Hugh Casey’s great relief pitching,” said Durocher at the end of the season.⁹

Brooklyn clinched the National League flag on September 25 at Braves Field in Boston. The Dodgers were to face the mighty New York Yankees in the two teams’ inaugural Fall Classic meeting. Casey strutted around Yankee Stadium before Game One and announced that he was more than ready for “them damn Yankees.” (Casey was never shy about his Southern roots.) “Ah promise to protect that advantage with mah life’s blood,” he exclaimed. “Which is the blood of the old South and the Confederacy, suh!”¹⁰ In the Series opener he made good on his boast, relieving in the sixth inning with two on base and retiring Phil Rizzuto and Red Ruffing on fly balls before he was lifted for a pinch hitter in the top of the seventh.

After the Dodgers won Game Two to tie the Series, the scene shifted to Ebbets Field and Casey’s fortunes turned for the worse. Durocher called on him in the eighth inning of a scoreless Game Three after starter Fred Fitzsimmons had been struck on the left knee by a drive off the bat of his mound opponent, Marius Russo. Hugh allowed a pair of Yankees tallies on four consecutive singles, including one by Tommy Henrich in which Casey was slow in covering first base. The final score was 2–1 Yankees.

Game Four was played on October 5, an unseasonably warm Sunday in Brooklyn. Called on to relieve Johnny Allen with two out in the fifth, Brooklyn trailing, 3–2, and the bases loaded, Casey got Joe Gordon on a fly to left to end the threat. The Dodgers took a 4–3 lead in the bottom of the inning on Pete Reiser’s two-run homer. Hugh doggedly guarded that slim edge until there were two out in the ninth.

Then, with Henrich again at the plate, Casey’s 3-2 curve—or was it a spitter?—broke sharply down and away from the mitt of Brooklyn catcher Mickey Owen and toward the backstop. Henrich, equally fooled by the pitch, flailed futilely at it, quickly glanced back, and then hustled to first. He arrived there safely before the frustrated Owen could recover. The Yankees then reached Casey for a single, two doubles, and two walks before he finally got the third out.  

The Dodgers failed to score in the bottom of the ninth, and Casey was a loser for the second consecutive day. New York’s 7–4 victory gave them a commanding three-games-to-one lead. When they clinched the title the following afternoon, it seemed almost anti-climactic to Brooklyn fans. 

Owen, who was charged with an error on the play, was practically in tears after the Game Four loss. “Sure, it was my fault,” he moaned. His batterymate was more philosophical about it, at least to the press. “I guess I’ve lost ’em just about every way now.”¹¹ For the rest of his life, Casey maintained that the pitch was a curve and not a spitter. 

After an offseason that included harrowing memories of the pitch that got away, questions about his military status, a threat by the pitcher to retire from baseball and instead pump gas in Atlanta (a weak ploy for more money), a separation from his wife Kathleen (Thomas) Casey, whom he had married in 1937, and an intense dieting regimen, it was Ernest Hemingway, and not fate, that nearly knocked Casey out.

With the Dodgers training in Havana, Cuba, in 1942, the author—who spent a lot of time there and was a big baseball fan—invited a group of Dodgers to accompany him for an evening of eating, drinking, and merriment. After several rounds of drinks, Hemingway sized up Casey and challenged him to a few rounds of boxing. Casey demurred at first, but after Hemingway sucker-punched him, Casey donned a pair of gloves and began to batter his host. 

Tables, chairs, trays, and glasses went flying as the two inebriated men exchanged blows. At one point, Hemingway’s wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn, awakened by the commotion, came down from her bedroom to see what the ruckus was all about. Ernest assured her it was nothing serious. Finally, tired of being knocked down so often, the author administered a shot to Casey’s groin, and then surrendered. 

Both Casey and the Dodgers began the 1942 campaign on fire. Going into a July 18 doubleheader at St. Louis, Brooklyn led the second-place Cardinals by eight games. Casey was sporting a tidy 1.80 ERA after seventy-five innings pitched, spread over twenty-nine appearances. In addition, he was doing his share for the war effort by visiting shipyard workers around the borough and lending a hand to the War Bond drive. Big Hugh was photographed often at one of those shipyards, the ever-present cigar wedged firmly in his mouth.

In the July 18 opener, Casey was nursing a 4–3 lead with two out in the sixth inning when a Stan Musial line drive fractured the pinky finger of his pitching hand.¹² Casey tried to make the play, but threw wildly to first allowing both base runners to score in what eventually became a 7–4 Brooklyn defeat. Once removed from the contest, Casey sat in front of his locker and downed an entire pint of whiskey.¹³ Hugh’s broken finger kept him out of action until August 6. 

The Cardinals, nine games behind the Dodgers as play started on August 11, won thirty of their next thirty-six games and vaulted into first place on September 13. Despite Brooklyn’s 10-2 streak to end the season, the Cardinals went 11-1, and the Dodgers fell two games short of repeating as National League champions. Casey contributed a 1.64 ERA in six games during that twelve-game span. The disappointment lingered with Hugh for years as military duty prevented him from seeing big-league action again until 1946.

Casey reported for active duty with the US Navy in January 1943 and spent the next three years in the military, rising to the rank of chief petty officer. Most of his time in the service, however, was spent playing ball. Released from active duty in December 1945, Casey reported to the Dodgers training camp in Daytona Beach, Florida, in the spring of 1946. Despite a rocky start and finish, he enjoyed another stellar season in the Dodgers bullpen, with an 11-5 record and a 1.99 earned run average.

On the final day of the season, the Dodgers and the Cardinals were tied for first place. With Brooklyn trailing the Boston Braves, 1–0, at Ebbets Field, Casey was called in to hold Boston in the ninth inning. But he allowed a walk and two hits before Durocher removed him. The Dodgers eventually lost, 4–0, but St. Louis lost also, necessitating a tiebreaking playoff for the first time in major-league history. With Brooklyn quickly dropping two straight to the Cardinals—holding a lead only in the first inning of Game Two—the relief ace’s talents were not required. 

The Dodgers and Casey bounced back to win the pennant in 1947. Once again the Yankees provided the competition in the World Series and once again Brooklyn came up short. En route to the pennant, some cracks were beginning to appear in the façade of thirty-three-year-old Hugh Casey. 

Despite eighteen saves in 1947—a figure that would have led the National League had saves been an official statistic—Casey had to shut down for the regular season in mid-September because of a lame shoulder and a kink in his right elbow. He had become mostly a spectator, albeit an enthusiastic one, when he threw his pennant-clinching bash at his bistro.

Casey’s ERA ballooned to 3.99, double what it was in 1946. This was also the first season he served entirely as a reliever, not starting a single game.¹⁴ Late on a May evening in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, on the way to his Flatbush tavern, Casey struck and killed a blind man while driving his automobile. There were no criminal charges pressed against him, nor was he arrested. Questions remained, however, as to the state of his sobriety at the time of the accident. 

In many ways the 1947 World Series was a showcase for the teams’ ace relievers: Casey and New York’s Joe Page. Casey established a World Series record by appearing in six games, five consecutively.¹⁵ He was credited with two wins and a save, allowing only one run and five hits in ten and a third innings. Page, whose numbers were not as good as Casey’s, received the greater accolades primarily for his five relief innings of no-run, one-hit pitching in the decisive Game Seven, won by the Yankees, 5–2.

If there was a moment of redemption for Casey in the ’47 Series, it came on a single pitch in the ninth inning of Game Four. With the bases loaded and one out, he induced his old nemesis, Tommy Henrich, to bounce into a 1-2-3 double play. Cookie Lavagetto’s pinch-hit, two-run, game-winning double in the bottom of the ninth denied New York’s Bill Bevens both a victory and the first World Series no-hitter. To Casey, Brooklyn’s dramatic 3–2 win made up for every game the Dodgers ever lost to the Yankees

By 1948 everything was beginning to go wrong for Hugh Casey. He reported to the Dodgers’ spring-training camp in the Dominican Republic grossly overweight, and later was sidelined by what was described as “a mysterious ailment.”¹⁶ On Opening Day, at the Polo Grounds, Casey was barely able to hang on to a 7–3 Brooklyn lead, allowing three runs to score before finally getting the final out with the tying run third base.

On May 20, during a loss to St. Louis, Casey beaned Cardinals catcher Del Rice. “The ball wasn’t more than an inch or so inside,” Casey muttered in his defense. But Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer “half-drawled” to Hugh: “You’re a better pitcher than that.”¹⁷

Then, four days later, Casey slipped and fell down a flight of stairs coming from his apartment, directly above his bar. Suffering “torn tendons and ligaments” after landing heavily on his right side, he did not pitch for more than two months. 

Casey’s heavy drinking was becoming more and more obvious. Red Barber, the Dodgers’ broadcaster, noted that according to other Dodgers, Hugh’s bedtime routine included cigars, comic books, and a bottle of whiskey. He would lie in bed smoking the stogie, reading the comic books, and drinking his liquor straight until either “the bottle or he was finished.”¹⁸

After his injury, Casey made three successful “rehab” appearances for the semipro Bushwicks in early July before making his first appearance with the Dodgers. Pitching before a crowd of 65,000 at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium on July 14, he tossed four and two-thirds effective innings in an exhibition game against the Indians. After pitching only thirty-six innings and posting an ERA of 8.00 in 1948, the Dodgers released him on September 29. 

In October Casey, now thirty-five, signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Used sparingly, he appeared in only thirty-three games, often in a mop-up role. In two consecutive games against Brooklyn—June 25 and 26—Casey was battered by his ex-teammates. In the June 26 game, he twice threw pitches close to Jackie Robinson. His second delivery hit Jackie in the right knee. Robinson made several comments to the pitcher as he made his way to first base, but Casey just stared at him without saying a word. After the Pirates released him on August 10, Casey signed with the Yankees. He appeared in only four games and was ineffective in three of them. 

Casey returned to his hometown Atlanta Crackers for the 1950 campaign, where he was reunited with former Dodgers teammates Dixie Walker, now the Southern Association club’s manager, and Whitlow Wyatt, their pitching coach. He won ten games working as both a starter and reliever for the pennant-winning Crackers.

But in 1950 Casey’s personal problems were beginning to mount. He was sued by a Brooklyn woman, Hilda Weissman, who alleged that Casey was the father of her son, Michael Hammond, born the previous November 2. “I know the girl,” Casey explained. “She used to hang around the ball park and the ball players in Brooklyn, and come into my bar and grill once in a while. But that’s all.”¹⁹

Weissman, however, described four evenings spent with Casey at Brooklyn’s St. George Hotel in January and February 1949. After a trial in December 1950, Casey was ruled the father of the child and ordered to pay $20-a-week child support to Weissman. He said he would appeal the verdict, while his wife Kathleen, who was by his side through the entire trial, was supportive. “My belief in my husband still stands,” she proclaimed after the verdict. “I know he is not guilty of being the father of this child.”

Meanwhile, Casey’s life continued to unravel. On January 31, 1951, a tax lien for $6,759.36 was filed against him for unpaid income taxes. Now sole proprietor of Hugh Casey’s Steaks and Chops, he feared he would lose the bar. Casey desperately tried hooking on with the Dodgers again for the ’51 season, but could get no further than pitching batting practice at Ebbets Field. He pitched once more at Dexter Park, in April 1951, this time as a member of the Hartford Indians against the Bushwicks. In May, Casey and his wife separated again, though Kathleen claimed it had nothing to do with the paternity suit.

A month later, in June 1951, Casey returned to Atlanta, ostensibly to try to settle his tax problems. He checked into the downtown Atlantan Hotel and allegedly told the bellboy that he was suffering from a leaking heart valve and had only ten days to live. 

During the early morning of July 3, 1951, Casey made two phone calls from his hotel room. One was to his good friend Gordon McNabb, an Atlanta real-estate agent. The other was to his wife. In both cases, he announced that he was going to kill himself. With the estranged Mrs. Casey on the line begging him not to do it, Casey placed a 16-gauge shotgun to his head. At about the same time, McNabb and his wife were about thirty feet away from Casey’s room, rushing to stop him from acting out his threat. All three heard the single shot fired from the shotgun. According to Kathleen Casey, Hugh’s final words were, “I am innocent of those [paternity] charges.”²⁰

When the news reached Casey’s bar, a group of patrons raised their glasses one final time to the man whose round face and ample body looked down on them in a portrait. A toast was proposed to “the guy who was kind to everyone but himself.”²¹ With Dixie Walker and Whit Wyatt serving as pallbearers, Hugh Casey was buried in the Mount Paran Church of God cemetery in Atlanta, Georgia on July 4, 1951.   

Notes

1. Brooklyn Eagle, September 20, 1947.

2. New York Post, September 23, 1947.

3. Sporting News, March 28, 1940.

4. Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1938.

5. Baseball Magazine, February 1940.

6. Sporting News, March 28, 1940.

7. Baseball Digest, April 1948.

8. Ibid.

9. New York Times, September 27, 1941.

10. Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1936.

11. Los Angeles Times, October 6, 1941.

12. Ibid.

13. Red Barber, The Rhubarb Patch: The Story of the Modern Brooklyn Dodgers, p. 59.

14. Casey started two games in 1942 and one in 1946.

15. Reportedly, he realized his arm was sound enough to pitch in the Series only after throwing a baseball at teammate Vic Lombardi. The little left-handed pitcher had accused Casey of babying his arm by spending all his time in the clubhouse’s diathermy machine.

16. Chicago Tribune, March 26, 1948.

17. Brooklyn Eagle, May 21, 1948.

18. Red Barber, The Rhubarb Patch: The Story of the Modern Brooklyn Dodgers, p. 59.

19. New York Mirror, April 22, 1950.

20. New York World-Telegram and Sun, July 3, 1951.

21. Sporting News, July 11, 1951.