Gene Autry was the kind of man who paid the bills for old friends in their old age, rode in the front seat beside his chauffeur, and showed up in the bar of his resort hotel to lead guests in a sing-along. During his heyday as a singing cowboy, his fans ranged from the obvious ­— Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson — to the improbable ­— Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ringo Starr. Thirty years after he quit performing, his theme song, “Back in the Saddle Again,” returned to the pop charts on the movie soundtrack for Sleepless in Seattle.

He once described himself as “a frustrated ballplayer,” and delighted in his second career as a baseball owner.1 The Angels were his passion for the last four decades of his life. A portly, perpetually smiling man decked out in a western suit and a big Stetson — white, of course — Autry often traveled with his team and spent lavishly on free agents in futile pursuit of a championship. The Angels retired number 26 in honor of their 26th man.

Autry never was a cowboy, but he played one on TV and radio and in movies. “I was the first of the singing cowboys,” he said. “I’m not sure I was the best. But when you’re first it doesn’t matter. No one can ever be first again.”2

He introduced two of the most popular Christmas songs, and invested his Hollywood earnings to build a fortune that landed him on Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans for 10 years. His television sidekick, Pat Buttram, said, “Gene Autry used to ride off into the sunset. Now he owns it.”3

Orvon Grover Autry was born in Tioga, Texas, on September 29, 1907, the first child of Delbert Autry and the former Elnora Ozment. He seldom spoke of his childhood because he wanted to forget most of it. His father was generally worthless, absent more often than present, and his mother and her four children had to depend on the charity of relatives in Texas and Oklahoma. Orvon dropped out of high school to help support the family as a railroad telegrapher.4

When he was 12, he had saved $8 from farm chores to buy a guitar out of the Sears Roebuck catalog. He liked to tell of the night that the world’s most famous Oklahoma native, Will Rogers, walked into a railroad depot, heard him picking and singing, and encouraged his dream of a music career. The tale may be a press agent’s invention; its first documented appearance didn’t come until after Rogers’ death.

At 20, Orvon traveled to New York in search of a recording contract, but was turned away. He came home with a new name, Gene Autry, probably borrowed from a popular crooner, Gene Austin, whom he met on the trip.

In his first radio gig, at KVOO in Tulsa, he was billed as Oklahoma’s Yodeling Cowboy and imitated country star Jimmie Rodgers. His first hit record, “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine,” propelled him to the big time on Chicago’s WLS Barn Dance, the model for Nashville’s enduring Grand Ole Opry.

During a trip home to Oklahoma, Autry met Ina Mae Spivey and married her four months later, on April 1, 1932. The wedding was so sudden that some friends thought it was an April Fool’s prank, but the marriage lasted 48 years. After Gene’s mother died that spring, his two sisters and brother moved in with the newlyweds. Ina, just 21, became their surrogate mother. The Autrys never had children.

On July 4, 1934, he, Ina, and his comic sidekick, Smiley Burnette, left Chicago for Hollywood in Gene’s Buick. He thought movies would help sell his records. His debut was a singing cameo in In Old Santa Fe, starring a leading cowboy actor, Ken Maynard. The greenhorn appeared stiff and awkward on screen. Embarrassed, he decided to go back to radio. But Maynard was supportive and gave him a small part in a serial, Mystery Mountain. Autry was more singer than cowboy; a stunt man had to step in when he couldn’t handle a galloping horse.

Autry’s big break came when Maynard was fired for his drunken tantrums. The newcomer took over the lead role in a bizarre 12-part serial, The Phantom Empire, where he played a singing cowboy battling robots and mad scientists. (Years later, when Maynard was living in a trailer park, Autry sent him monthly checks. He made donations to several other early benefactors who were needy in their declining years.)

Three years after Autry arrived in Hollywood, a trade publication named him the #1 star of action melodramas in 1937. His movies for Republic Pictures followed a simple formula for wholesome, if bland, family entertainment: Good guy defeats bad guy, but never shoots first and never kills anybody. Hero gets girl, but never kisses her. Kissing was allowed in the early films, but the clinches disappeared when the studio realized that Autry’s core audience was pre-teen boys, who didn’t go for that mushy stuff. They preferred to see him with his horse, Champion.

While Autry made action movies, they were unconventional westerns. Before signing him to his first contract, a studio executive had complained that he lacked “virility.”5 At 5-feet-9, he was not tall, muscular, or imposing. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther described him as a “medium-height, sandy-haired, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, baby-faced fellow.”6 Nor was he an acrobatic horseman like Maynard and the king of silent-screen cowboys, Tom Mix. Songs took on a larger role in Autry films than gunplay or fistfights.

By 1937 he was making $6,000 per picture, equivalent to around $100,000 in 2017, but was still ridiculously underpaid given his popularity.7 He went on strike.

During his holdout, Republic brass created a replacement singing “cowboy” they named Roy Rogers. Born Leonard Slye in Cincinnati, he had had bit parts in several Autry films.8 The two became rivals, but friendly ones.

From his earliest days, Autry used every avenue to turn his fame into money. The Sears catalog sold Gene Autry Roundup guitars, and he was said to be the first Hollywood star to put his name on comic books, school lunchboxes, jeans, and more than 100 other products, though he refused to endorse cigarettes.9 With records, songbooks, and personal appearances, his outside income exceeded his film earnings.

Autry took his stage show to England and Ireland in 1939. It was a triumph; his biographer, Holly George-Warren, likened it to the Beatles’ first American tour.10 A reported 250,000 people jammed the streets of Dublin for a look at the cowboy. In the crowd was another American tourist, P.K. Wrigley, the owner of the chewing-gum company. When Wrigley returned home, he ordered his ad agency to sign Autry for a weekly CBS radio show sponsored by Doublemint gum. That added a new profit center to Autry’s empire, giving him a foothold in all entertainment media.

His career reached its pinnacle when theater owners voted him the #4 male box-office attraction of 1940, behind Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy. It was a stunning achievement for a B-movie actor whose greatest appeal was in small towns rather than big-city film palaces. His income in 1941 approached half a million dollars.

Autry’s reign as the #1 western star ended while he was serving in the Army Air Corps during World War II. When he sued Republic trying to get out of his contract, the studio retaliated by promoting Roy Rogers, who was found unfit for military service because of a bad back. In 1943 Rogers climbed to #1, a pedestal Autry never regained. Life magazine headlined a cover story on Rogers, “King of the Cowboys.”11

Seeing harsh evidence that stardom was temporary, Autry turned his energy toward business after the war. He bought radio and television stations and hotels, and invested in oil wells and real estate. When the California Supreme Court finally freed him from his Republic contract, he formed his own production company to make movies in partnership with Columbia, one of the major studios. The arrangement gave him control of his work as well as a tax shelter.

He also resumed his radio show and personal appearance tours, and enjoyed six top-10 records in 1947. In the fall he released “Here Comes Santa Claus,” a song he co-wrote after he heard a child’s exuberant shout at a Christmas parade.12 It became a holiday standard, but nothing compared to his next Christmas song.

“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” carried Autry to the top of Billboard’s country and pop charts for the first time and sold two million copies in 1949, with millions more to follow. It is often said to be the second best-selling Christmas record in history, after Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” but the Guinness Book of World Records lists it in third place behind another Crosby hit, “Silent Night.”

In 1950 Autry was the first major movie star to jump into television. William Boyd, whom he dismissed as a third-rate actor, had become a TV cowboy sensation by recycling cut-down versions of his old Hopalong Cassidy movies, igniting a children’s craze for “Hoppy” merchandise.

Autry began starring in weekly original half-hour films on CBS-TV. His company produced three more western series for the network. One was Annie Oakley, the first TV western with a female star, his sometime girlfriend Gail Davis.

But Autry’s career was sliding downhill, and so was he. His new records weren’t selling. Television killed many of the small-town theaters that had showcased his movies. So-called adult westerns, such as High Noon and TV’s Gunsmoke, made the singing cowboys seem campy. He released his last feature film in 1953.

His heavy drinking, which began during the war, was interfering with his work. After he missed a number of shows, his longtime sponsor, Wrigley, canceled his radio and TV series in 1956. His live performances became unreliable. Although his loyal staff tried to cover for him, fans saw him fall off his horse and appear too drunk to mount up.

As Autry’s entertainment career fizzled out, his business portfolio continued to expand. One of his biggest money-makers was Los Angeles radio station KMPC. The station aired Dodgers games after the team moved west in 1958, but its signal was too weak to reach club owner Walter O’Malley’s home at Lake Arrowhead. O’Malley moved the broadcasts to a more powerful outlet, one he could hear.

KMPC, billed as Southern California’s sports station, needed a new anchor for its summer schedule. Autry thought he had found one when Hank Greenberg came calling in November 1960. The home run slugger turned baseball executive had secretly won the American League’s blessing to put an expansion team in Los Angeles in 1961. Autry was negotiating for broadcast rights when Greenberg’s plans blew up.

O’Malley didn’t want to share the LA market. He leaned on Commissioner Ford Frick, and the commissioner decreed that O’Malley deserved compensation for allowing a competing team into “his” territory. Hearing that, Greenberg walked away, throwing the AL expansion blueprint into “frightful chaos,” as the writer Frank Finch put it.13 With a franchise already awarded to Washington, the league had to have a tenth club to balance the schedule, and time was slipping away.

The familiar story is that Autry went to the AL meeting hoping to secure radio rights for the new franchise, and wound up owning the team. In fact, published reports identified him as a bidder for the team before the meeting, and he said he became interested as soon as Greenberg dropped out: “I thought it was all Greenberg. When it appeared it wasn’t, the thought occurred to me that I’d like that franchise.”14 When he went to the league meeting, Autry brought along his choice for general manager: Fred Haney, an LA resident who had managed the Milwaukee Braves to two pennants.

AL owners were facing ridicule over their bungled expansion when they met in St. Louis on December 5. Just as in the movies, the hero in the white hat came riding to the rescue. The league welcomed him as a savior, and why not? He was a famous, popular — and rich ­— man who wanted to own a ball club.

But O’Malley exacted a stiff price. The new team would have to pay him $350,000 for a ticket of admission to enter Los Angeles. Instead of sharing the 90,000-seat LA Coliseum with the Dodgers, the American League club would play its first season in the city’s minor-league ballpark, Wrigley Field, with room for about 22,000. That ensured that the team would lose money. Beginning in 1962, it would be O’Malley’s tenant in his new park, under construction at Chavez Ravine, paying a minimum $200,000 in rent, or 7.5 percent of gate receipts. O’Malley would keep all parking revenue and some of the take from concessions.

In addition, O’Malley didn’t want competition from television. He televised only 11 Dodger games ­— those in San Francisco against the archrival Giants ­— and the new club was limited to the same number.

All told, Autry estimated the deal was worth $750,000 a year to the Dodgers. After a meeting with O’Malley that lasted nearly all night, he agreed to pay. It was the price of doing business.15

“For me, it’s the realization of a lifetime dream,” Autry said.16 He had played semipro ball in his youth and claimed to have been invited to a Cardinals tryout camp. While filming his movies, he had organized pickup games during breaks, and had once owned a share of the Pacific Coast League’s Hollywood Stars.

The new team adopted the name of LA’s other PCL entry, the Angels. Casey Stengel, recently fired by the Yankees, turned down an offer to be the manager. Haney talked to Leo Durocher, but Durocher’s price was apparently too high. The club hired Bill Rigney, who had succeeded Durocher as manager of the Giants.

Because of the delay in awarding the franchise, Haney had only a week to prepare for the player draft that would stock the Angels’ roster. Stengel gave him a rundown on the available players, who were mostly benchwarmers and over-age veterans. AL teams were permitted to keep their front-line talent and top prospects.

Haney went for well-known names in the draft, hoping to convince LA fans that the castoffs were a real big league team. But Ted Kluszewski, Eddie Yost, Ned Garver, and Bob Cerv had to look backward to see their 34th birthdays. Haney did grab a pair of young minor leaguers who became franchise cornerstones, shortstop Jim Fregosi and catcher Buck Rodgers. After the draft he acquired pitching prospect Dean Chance.

During spring training Autry put the players up at his hotel in Palm Springs, California, and mounted a bicycle to lead them in a parade to the ballpark. The Angels opened their inaugural season with eight games on the road. They lost seven of them. The home opener produced defeat number 8 before an embarrassing turnout of just 11,931. The club rallied to a 70-91 record, still the most victories by a first-year expansion team, finishing eighth in the standings but ninth in attendance, drawing barely 600,000.

In their second season, the Angels startled the league by charging into the pennant race. They held first place on the Fourth of July and finished third, with 86 victories. Attendance nearly doubled in their first year in O’Malley’s new ballpark. Its formal name was Dodger Stadium, but the Angels called it Chavez Ravine.

Autry soon began looking for a way to climb out of the ravine. He vented his complaints in uncharacteristically blunt language: “Chavez Ravine is an expensive stadium to operate, Walter O’Malley is a difficult landlord, the Angels are treated as a stepchild by the Dodgers, … we are playing in the shadow of the Dodgers and we must build our own fan following elsewhere.”17 On August 31, 1964, he broke ground for a new stadium in Anaheim, 30 miles south, to be paid for by the city.

Renamed the California Angels, the team moved into its new home in 1966. But attendance continued to lag far behind the Dodgers, who were setting records and piling up giant profits. The Angels were Southern California’s stepchild team. They settled into mediocrity, usually in the bottom half of the standings.

Autry yearned for a championship, but he was a hands-off owner. “I’ve tried hard not to interfere with the men on the firing line,” he said. “I have wondered often why a manager did this or that, but I have tried to restrain my second-guessing.”18 Some critics thought that was why the Angels didn’t win: The owner didn’t demand it. “Gene is a fan,” a former general manager, Dick Walsh, said. “The team is a plaything, a fun thing.”19

Instead of getting tough during losing seasons, Autry treated players and managers as friends. “He knew every player and knew everything about his players … their kids’ names, their wives’ names,” pitcher Clyde Wright said. Autry went along on many road trips and made the rounds in the clubhouse before home games asking, “Anything you need?”20

Fireballer Nolan Ryan was one of the team’s few stars in the 1970s. He set the single-season strikeout record and pitched four of his seven no-hitters for the Angels. Ryan was as big a Gene Autry fan as any 9-year-old boy: “I can honestly say he is among the greatest men I have ever had the pleasure to know.”21

When free agency arrived after the 1976 season, Autry saw a chance to lift his club out of mediocrity. All it took was money, and he and his minority partner, Signal Companies, had plenty. The Angels signed three of the top-ranked free agents ­— outfielders Joe Rudi and Don Baylor and second baseman Bobby Grich — to long-term contracts totaling $5.25 million, equivalent to $22 million in 2017.

That doesn’t sound like much in the context of 21st century salaries, but in 1976 it was an unprecedented splurge that outraged many of Autry’s fellow owners. “I still don’t think all this is good for baseball,” he said. “But this is the way it is now, and there are certain facts of life we’re going to have to live with.”22

While he was counting on the pricey players to win games, Autry was also counting on an axiom of the entertainment business: Stars sell tickets. Attendance more than doubled in the next three years. After adding seven-time batting champion Rod Carew to their collection of free agents, the Angels won their first American League West title in 1979, then won again in 1982 and 1986. Each time they lost the league championship series.

Ina Autry died of cancer in 1980. Although they were outwardly devoted, her husband had spent large chunks of their 48-year marriage on the road or on location for his films, and had affairs with several of his leading ladies and uncounted groupies. Friends said Ina shut her eyes to all that. Most important, she had nurtured him through periods of uncontrolled drinking and unsuccessful attempts to quit.

Autry’s family life was always a pain. He supported his ex-convict father and his father’s second family for decades. His brother, Dudley, was an unfortunate chip off the old block, a wastrel and an alcoholic who tried and failed to ride the family name to a singing career and often ended up on Gene’s payroll. Dudley’s ex-wife, a trick-rope artist, also exploited the Autry name to help her career.

Eighteen months after Ina’s death, the 73-year-old Autry married Jacqueline Ellam, who was 34 years younger. A former bank executive, Jackie took over management of his businesses as he aged.

In his last years, Autry became a leading philanthropist in Southern California. He spent about $100 million to establish the Autry Museum of the American West, now known as the Autry National Center. (He had lost his first collection of western artifacts in a house fire in 1941.) He gave $5 million to build a wing of the Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Springs, where he and Jackie had a home.

Autry spent more years of his life as a baseball owner than as a singing cowboy, but the World Series eluded him. “For sure, baseball has been the most exciting and frustrating experience of my life,” he said. “In the movies, I never lost a fight. In baseball I hardly ever won one.”23

He turned over control of the Angels to his wife in 1990. In May 1995 Autry announced an agreement in principle to sell operating control of the team to the Walt Disney Company. Soon afterward the Angels climbed into first place and adopted the rallying cry “Win one for the cowboy,” but they blew an 11-game lead and lost the Western Division title to Seattle in a one-game playoff.

The Disney deal closed in early 1996, ending Autry’s active involvement. The company acquired 25 percent of the franchise with an option to buy the rest after his death. Autry continued to attend Angels games when he was able. He contracted lymphoma and died at 91 on October 2, 1998. He was mourned as a good man, an American success story, and, for many, a reminder of happy childhood.

Autry called himself a personality, not a singer or actor. “When I started, they said I couldn’t act,” he once recalled. “Other people said I couldn’t sing, but I sure as hell could count.”24

Four years after Autry’s death, the Angels won the 2002 pennant and defeated the Giants in the World Series to claim their first championship. In the joyful clubhouse after Game Seven, manager Mike Scioscia hoisted a bottle of champagne to toast the cowboy.

An earlier version of this biography appeared in “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors” (SABR, 2018), edited by Rob Edelman and Bill Nowlin.

Acknowledgments

This biography was reviewed by Jan Finkel and fact-checked by Stephen Glotfelty.

Notes

1 Myrna Oliver, “Gene Autry Dies,” Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1998: 24.

2 Al Martinez, “2 Old-Time Cowboy Stars Reflect a Heroic Age,” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1977: II-6.

3 Bruce Fessier, “Autry was sunshine in lots of lives,” Desert Sun (Palm Springs, California), October 3, 1998: 3.

4 If not otherwise credited, information about Autry’s personal life and Hollywood career comes from Holly George-Warren, Public Cowboy no. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

5 George-Warren, 138.

6 Bosley Crowther, “A Cowboy Without a Lament,” New York Times, August 6, 1939: X3.

7 Inflation calculator at https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl.

8 The apartment building where Slye was born stood on the future site of Riverfront Stadium, home of the Big Red Machine. He liked to say he was born on second base. Laurence Zewisohn, “Happy Trails: The Life of Roy Rogers,” http://www.royrogers.com/roy_rogers_bio.html, accessed May 19, 2017.

9 Some Gene Autry cowboy suits were made of flammable fabric. Two children died from fires and others were hurt. Autry was the target of several lawsuits over the product.

10 George-Warren, 182.

11 Life, July 12, 1943.

12 Autry is credited as co-writer on more than 300 songs, but many of those are “star credits.” Singing stars often took writing credit on songs they popularized, and some songwriters didn’t mind because the famous name made the song more salable.

13 Frank Finch, “Rumors have AL expanding,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1960: H5.

14 Jeanne Hoffman, “Autry Set to Build Angels in 120 Days,” Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1960: IV-5. The first mention of Autry as one of the bidders was before the AL meetings of November 22 and December 5: Paul Zimmerman, “Greenberg Out, L.A. Team Up for Bids” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1960: II-1.

15 Finch, “It’s Official! Angels to Play in 1961,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1960: IV-1; Andy McCue, Mover and Shaker: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers, & Baseball’s Westward Expansion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 292-293.

16 Hoffman.

17 Al Carr, “When and Will Angels Move?” Los Angeles Times, February 9, 1964: 14

18 Ross Newhan, “No. 26 on the Wall, No. 1 in their Hearts,” Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1998: C6.

19 Ron Rapaport, “Angels Haven’t Had a Sweet 16,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1976: III-1.

20 Tom Singer, “Tribute precedes Autry’s induction to Hall,” mlb.com, July 19, 2011, http://m.mlb.com/news/article/21960212/, accessed May 22, 2017.

21 Ibid.

22 Dick Miller, “Rudi, Baylor Give Angels Case of Flag Fever,” The Sporting News, December 4, 1976: 65.

23 Oliver.

24 Richard Simon and Susan King, “Friends and fans recall an American icon,” Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1998: 25.

Belinsky took baseball by storm as a rookie with the Los Angeles Angels in 1962, and captured the hearts of the Hollywood jet set. Good-looking with a dark complexion and slicked-back black hair, the roughneck from the streets of Trenton, New Jersey, turned Tinseltown upside down when he tossed a no-hitter in his fourth big-league start, en route to winning six of his first seven starts. That gem changed his life, and cast him on an odyssey that few big-league players could ever imagine. Belinsky’s ego was as big as his fastball was daunting. He flouted the conservative mores of baseball by praising himself and living by his own rules. Days after his no-hitter, he became a regular at Hollywood afterparties, where he met Walter Winchell, an aging influential gossip columnist, who introduced him to Hollywood A-listers, and plenty of B-listers, and a seemingly endless supply of actresses and wanna-be’s who lined up to meet the most eligible bachelor in town not named Hugh Hefner. Belinsky was the country’s best-known athlete-playboy, 3½ years before Joe Willie Namath took a bite out of the Big Apple. “Playing baseball seemed only incidental,” said Belinsky in retirement. “I was just on a mad whirl day and night.”2

Belinsky made as many headlines with women as for his occasional pitching victories. “For both variety and sheer volume of female companions,” opined sportswriter Myron Cope, “Belinsky is an authentic lion of the boudoir.”3 He dated Ann-Margret, Tina Louise, and Connie Stevens, was briefly engaged to Mamie Van Doren in 1963, and married Jo Collins, Playboy’s 1965 Playmate of the Year, in 1968. “What I’m looking for is one with dough,” said Belinsky as a rookie. “I need a poor one like Custer needed more Indians.”4 He got his wish more than a decade later when he married Jane Weyerhaeuser, the heiress to the Weyerhaeuser paper fortune, in 1975. Both the aforementioned marriages ended in divorce. “My philosophy of life?” said Belinsky in one of his most memorable quips. “That’s easy. If music be the food of love, by all means let the band play on.”5

Years before Nike ran an ad campaign focusing on two-sport star Bo Jackson, “Bo Knows” could have referred to Belinsky, as in “Bo Knows — No Rules.” “I was serious when I pitched,” he said after retiring, his memory of reality slightly distorted, “but off the mound I defined myself. I tried to live my life the way I wanted, with a little style, a little creativity.”6 He drove around Hollywood in a bright red Cadillac convertible, a gift from a local auto dealer after his no-hitter. Belinsky earned only $10,000 as a rookie, and $15,000 two years later, but enjoyed a supersized lifestyle. “I live like a man who makes $70,000,” he once said. “The places I go and the people I bang into and the dinners that I don’t pay for …”7 Even Belinsky’s mother seemed ill at ease with her son’s predilection for glitz and glamour, but wasn’t surprised. “Bo likes money,” she said, “but he doesn’t work hard to get it. He’s always been that way. He was a kid with high ideas and low pockets.”8

“My career?” said Belinsky in retirement. “It was no big thing.”9 Belinsky was correct about his pitching — it was dismal. But it was his life off the mound that made him one of the most colorful characters and most recognizable athletes of the early to mid-1960s. He captured the zeitgeist of the pre-Vietnam War swinging ’60s, and marked the gradual dissolution of the button-down conservatism of the previous decade. “In the long run it wore me down physically and mentally,” said Belinsky about his fast-paced living.10 Writer Steve Oney described Belinsky as a cross between the debonair Dean Martin and the antiestablishment Jack Kerouac.11 Belinsky’s controversy-filled three-year stint with the Angels ended when he cold-cocked a 64-year-old reporter and was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. Belinsky knocked around a few more years before retiring in 1970, the years of heavy drinking, smoking, and partying having taken a toll on his once svelte body.

Robert Belinsky was born on December 7, 1936, in New York City, to Edward and Anna (Polnoff) Belinsky. A few years later the family left its tenement house on the Lower East Side and moved to Trenton, New Jersey, where the elder Belinsky had been born. The Belinsky family, which grew to four with the birth of daughter Lorraine, had limited means; Edward had been a handyman at an apartment house, and later opened a TV repair shop; Anna was a stocking inspector at the Gold Stripe Hosiery Company. Though Belinsky is often identified as a Jewish ballplayer (his mother was Jewish and his father was Catholic), he was not raised in a religious household. Rather, Belinsky was proverbially baptized on the streets of Trenton, where he became a two-bit poolhall hustler and fighter, and was nicknamed Bo (he had been called Bob as a child) after boxer Bobo Olson. “When I think of Trenton,” said Belinsky in a tell-all story about his life, Bo: Pitching and Wooing, by Maury Allen (published in 1973), “I can’t imagine I lived there as long as I did. Things were tough.”12 Belinsky attended Trenton Central High School but didn’t play sports. They were “too regimented,” he claimed, plus he didn’t like the rah-rah stuff.13

Belinsky’s introduction to baseball was on Trenton sandlots and in semipro leagues which afforded him the freedom to come and go as he pleased. After graduating from school in 1955, Belinsky hung around Trenton, hustled in nearby cities with noted pool sharks, and took the mound occasionally. The Pittsburgh Pirates took a chance on the 6-foot-2 southpaw with a mean heater and signed Belinsky on May 15, 1956, to a contract on scout Rex Rowen’s suggestion.14 “I never liked baseball that much — at first, anyway,” said Belinsky. “I only signed a contract to get out of Trenton.”15 Pittsburgh assigned him to Brunswick in the Class-D Georgia-Florida League where it was an unmitigated disaster. Feeling out of place and earning $185 per month, Belinsky quit the team in midseason with a 7.36 ERA in 33 innings.

The Pirates sold Belinsky to the Baltimore Orioles, for whom he spent the next five seasons moving up the ladder and flashing signs of greatness, but also establishing a reputation as a carouser who enjoyed the night life more than baseball and was in the doghouse of every manager he played for. In 1957 he went 13-6 with Pensacola and finished with 202 strikeouts, second most in the Alabama-Florida League. The next season he led the Class-C Northern League in ERA (2.24) and strikeouts (184) while posting a misleading 10-14 record with the Aberdeen (South Dakota) Pheasants. After splitting his time among four different teams in 1959, Belinsky was fed up, and threatened to quit. “My career wasn’t going anywhere,” he recalled. “The Orioles had two young left-handers (Steve Barber and Steve Dalkowski) … that they liked a lot more than me.”16

After a look-see at Baltimore’s spring training in 1960, Belinsky was assigned to Vancouver in the Triple-A Pacific Coast League. His season was interrupted he was called to Army Reserve duties at Fort Knox. Discharged in July, he returned to the club, but injured his hand in a barroom fight and logged only 32 innings all season.

At spring training in 1961, Belinsky drove Orioles GM-manager Paul Richards crazy with his late-night drinking, partying, and womanizing. Assigned to Little Rock in the Double-A Southern Association, Belinsky enjoyed a breakthrough campaign. Expectations for the 24-year-old hurler were minimal — he had logged just 123 innings in the previous two seasons and relieved in more games than he had started. Belinsky unexpectedly blazed a trail, leading the circuit in punchouts (182 in 174 innings). He also kept his own counsel. After fanning 18 in an 11-inning no-decision on July 17, he announced he was quitting baseball to study electronics in Trenton.17 He ultimately came to his senses, and returned to the club. “I hated minor-league baseball,” said Belinsky later in his career. “[N]obody ever told me anything about pitching.”18

Despite Belinsky’s success, he was not added to Baltimore’s 40-man roster, and was subsequently chosen by the Los Angeles Angels in the Rule 5 draft on November 27, 1961. Angels scout Sammy Moses had been tracking Belinsky in Little Rock, while scout Tufie Hashem was impressed with the lefty’s recent pitching with Pampero in the Venezuelan Winter League.19 Belinsky mowed down competition, setting a new league record with 156 strikeouts (in 156 innings), and posted a 13-5 record and 2.13 ERA for a 21-30 club.20 He was transferred to Caracas for the postseason and won two more games, including the championship clincher.21

Belinsky was AWOL when the Angels camp opened in Palm Springs in late February 1962. He claimed he was “mentally tired” from winter ball in Venezuela.22 “Sure I’m late,” he said. “But it’s not when you report that counts; it’s how you pitch when they ask you to show your stuff.”23 Los Angeles sportswriters were soon to label the brash youngster as a kook, braggart, eccentric, and indifferent. Belinsky also objected to signing a $6,000 league-minimum contract. After pitching without a contract for two days, Belinsky faced his first ultimatum from GM Fred Haney, cut from the old school of top-down management: Either leave or sign. Belinsky acquiesced. He wouldn’t take that posture many more times in an Angels uniform. The media was attracted to Belinsky for his good copy; The Sporting News even opined that “his brazen attitude was refreshing.”24 Belinsky spoke candidly, touted his own greatness, and broke the mold of a deferential company man. He wore fancy clothes and dark sunglasses, and oozed a self-assurance rarely seen in unproven rookies. Braven Dyer, longtime sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times and Belinsky’s future nemesis, referred to him as “Handsome Bo,” a spitting image of Narcissus himself.25 Pitching coach Marv Grissom immediately recognized Belinsky’s potential in spring training, but also offered some of the first words of caution, suggesting the hurler’s future rests upon “how hard he cares to work, how well he looks after himself.”26

The circus ride began in earnest for Belinsky on April 18, 1962, when he scattered five hits and walked five, yielding two runs in six innings in front of a sparse crowd of 7,055 at Dodger Stadium to notch a victory in his big-league debut against the Kansas City A’s, 3-2. In his second start, a week later, he tossed a complete-game four-hitter to defeat the Cleveland Indians, 6-2. Belinsky’s life was forever altered in his fourth start, on May 5, against Baltimore. He overpowered the visiting Orioles with nine punchouts while walking four and not yielding a semblance of a hit to record the first major-league no-hitter on the West Coast. “Hollywood … is gaga over Bo,” gushed Dyer.27 Belinsky was immediately catapulted into fame and was the toast of Hollywood. Living off an adrenaline high and just a few hours sleep a night, Belinsky followed up his no-hitter by fanning a career-high 11 in 7⅓ innings against the Chicago White Sox to win his fifth straight start. He rebounded from his first loss to blank the Boston Red Sox, 1-0, on two hits in the second game of a doubleheader on May 20. Behind the scenes Haney and skipper Bill Rigney were concerned for the hottest pitcher in baseball, and implored him to cut out his “activities.”28 Local sportswriter Melvin Durslag wrote that since Belinsky’s no-hitter his “life that was once confused is now bedlam.”29

Winless in his previous five starts, and suffering from a leg injury, Belinsky was involved in his first high-profile scandal on June 13 when he was stopped by police in Beverly Hills at 5 A.M. after a night on the town with his roommate, rookie pitcher Dean Chance. Passenger Gloria Eves claimed that Belinsky assaulted her and threw her out of the car.30 (Eves’s eventual $150,000 lawsuit against Belinsky was tossed out in court).31 Belinsky was taken into police custody, but released. Belinsky’s life seemed to be careening out of control. On July 6 he crossed a sacred boundary in a disastrous outing, resulting in his formal censure by Haney. After yielding four runs to Boston in one-third of an inning, Belinsky stormed off the mound before Rigney arrived and flipped off the LA crowd on his exit.32 After just three months with the club, Belinsky had transformed from a budding superstar into a problem child with whom Haney vigorously sought to cut ties. The GM was worried about Belinsky’s negative influence on the team and especially the effect he had on Chance, who was quietly developing into the club’s best hurler.

Haney thought he found a golden parachute when he brokered a backroom deal with the Kansas City A’s, agreeing to purchase prospect Dan Osinski for a player to be named later. The clubs had a gentlemen’s agreement that Belinsky would be that player. With rumors circulating, the Los Angeles Times published a story about the deal on September 5.33 Many pointed to Belinsky as the source of the rumors. No doubt the Casanova wanted to avoid Kansas City at all costs. Six days earlier, UPI ran a national story about Belinsky’s guide to America after dark. He ranked Kansas City (with Baltimore) last in night life.34 One day after Belinsky’s trade was announced, Commissioner Ford Frick nullified the deal, stating that the transaction had been formally submitted as a cash deal.35 Belinsky finished his tumultuous, tension-filled first big-league season with a 10-11 slate, 3.56 ERA in 187⅓ innings, and 145 strikeouts, and led the majors with 122 walks, while the Angels, in just their second season, finished in third place with an 86-76 record.

Always criticized for his work ethic and commitment to baseball, Belinsky seemed more interested in a movie career, models, and his postgame highballs. He hired an actor’s agent and made some guest appearances in a few Hollywood productions, such as 77 Sunset Strip (1963), the Lloyd Bridges Show (1963), and That Regis Philbin Show (1964). He also had a minor role in one feature film, C’Mon, Let’s Live a Little (1967), a campy music drama starring popular pop singers Bobby Vee and Jackie DeShannon. According to Howard Thompson, writing in the New York Times, “Bo-Bo” is the “host of (an off-campus) twist nitery (and is played by), of all people, Bo Belinsky, right off the baseball diamond. Darkly handsome in a tux, the pitcher has a bit of acting to do and does it.”36

Given an ultimatum by Haney in the offseason to tone down his excessive lifestyle or risk his career, Belinsky promised to reform. However, he arrived late to spring training, citing an unspecified illness, and resumed his playboy act in Palm Springs, punctuated by an announcement of his engagement to Mamie Van Doren on April 2.37 Belinsky did not have another Cinderella story when the regular season began. He pitched terribly while rumors swirled that he’d be traded to the New York Yankees or Cleveland Indians. “[I]t’s unconceivable,” opined beat writer Al Wolf, “that Belinsky can stay under the same roof as Fred Haney.”38 In late May, a struggling Belinsky (1-7, 6.39) was optioned to the Angels’ Triple-A club in Hawaii. The Los Angeles Times reported the story in one of its wittiest headlines, “Call Him a P(lei)boy Now: Belinsky’s Off to Hawaii.”39 Belinsky laughed at the demotion (“Well at least Hawaii is a great place to be”40), then refused to report, setting off a seven-week soap opera. Suspended without pay, Belinsky finally reported to the Islanders on July 19. He pitched well and drew record crowds, leading the hurler to demand that the Angels reimburse him for his lost salary; an incredulous Haney laughed at the demand.41 Recalled in September, Belinsky appeared contrite only after making headlines with comments that he had no desire or obligation to help the team.42 Belinsky’s second big-league season was a disaster (2-9, 5.75 ERA) as the Angels fell to ninth place. The pitcher-turned-performer’s postseason began in late October when he began a seven-week gig as a lounge entertainer at the Silver Slipper club in Las Vegas.

Belinsky surprised everyone when he reported to the Angels’ spring training on time in 1964. He seemed to take practice seriously; sportswriters even noted that he wore his cap and his hair was short. In his season debut, Belinsky held the Detroit Tigers to one run over eight innings, but also injured his back and was sidelined 10 days. After several ineffective starts, he tossed a complete-game seven-hitter to beat the hard-hitting Minnesota Twins, 4-1, in Los Angeles in the second game of a doubleheader on May 27, kicking off the best stretch of pitching in his career. From May 27 to July 9, Belinsky won six of eight decisions and carved out an impressive 1.82 ERA in 59⅓ innings, capped off with a two-hit shutout against the Chicago White Sox.

Five weeks later Belinsky’s career with the Angels blew up. His downfall began with an interview with the AP’s Charles Maher after a tough complete-game loss to the Cleveland Indians, 3-0, on August 11. “I’ve gotta make a move,” said Belinsky. “This is my third year with the club and I’m going nowhere financially. You are never stable in this game.”43 Asked to comment on Belinsky’s threat to quit the team, Haney replied, “That’s up to Bo. He’s got to run his own life.”44 By the time those words were published in a nationally syndicated story on August 14, Belinsky’s fate had already been sealed. At about 1:30 A.M. the Angels and beat writers had arrived in Washington for a series with the Senators. Not long thereafter, sportswriter Braven Dyer, having caught wind of Maher’s article, confronted Belinsky in his room at the Shoreham Hotel. Apparently fueled by alcohol, the episode turned personal with both men trading insults. Then Belinsky cold-cocked the 64-year-old scribe, knocking him out. Belinsky was sent back to Los Angeles that day and immediately suspended without pay. “Just what right do the Angels have to suspend me?” said the indignant pitcher, who claimed self-defense.45 Days later, Belinsky, despite his 9-8 record and stellar 2.86 ERA, was optioned to Hawaii, but refused to report. “I didn’t care anymore,” said Belinsky. “I figured I was never going to play baseball anymore.”46 Haney’s nightmare finally ended on December 4 when he shipped his problem child to the Philadelphia Phillies in exchange for pitcher Rudy May and first baseman Costen Shockley. “I never thought Bo was all bad,” Rigney told Maury Allen. “I just think he was in the wrong business. He just wouldn’t work.”47

After his trade from the Angels, Belinsky won only seven more games (and lost 23) and logged just 266 more innings in his big-league career. Four of those victories came in a forgettable stint with the Phillies. “You want to be there when that arm comes back,” said skipper Gene Mauch about Belinsky. “He could pitch. He just wouldn’t work out. I wish I had a thousand guys with his arm and none with his head.”48 With Belinsky’s firebrand personality, Mauch quickly clashed with him. After seven horrendous starts (6.58 ERA in 39⅓ innings), Belinsky was shuttled to the bullpen and used primarily in relief. Sidelined for much of September with a broken rib, Belinsky drew a line in the sand: “I won’t be a relief pitcher next year. You can count on it.” Retorted Mauch, “He might be a starting pitcher in Little Rock” [the Phillies Triple-A team].49 Belinsky blamed Mauch for his pitching woes. “My arm just couldn’t take it,” he said of pitching long and short relief and starting. “I never really was a good pitcher after the 1965 season. … Mauch had a lot to do with that.”50

Belinsky’s increased drug use also had profound effects on his career. Like many major leaguers before and since, Belinsky admitted to occasionally taking greenies (amphetamines) on days he started, but a change occurred with the Phillies. According to Steve Oney in his excellent profile on the pitcher, Belinsky began taking “red juice,” a type of liquid amphetamine.51 “[W]hen I got into the bullpen, I started getting loaded every day, because as a reliever, you never know when you might have to play,” said Belinsky. “This chemical started coming into my life. I thought I could handle it.”52 Belinsky’s drug habit progressively worsened over the next decade.

Confined to the end of the Phillies bench in 1966, Belinsky’s tenure with the Phillies ended about two weeks after his “pitch me or trade me” ultimatum when he was optioned to the club’s Triple-A affiliate, the San Diego Padres, in mid-June.53

The Houston Astros took a chance on Belinsky (despite his 4.83 ERA in 54 innings in the PCL), selecting him in the Rule 5 draft on November 28, 1966. Just weeks before spring training in 1967, the Astros must have wondered what they had gotten themselves into by acquiring the wacky hurler. “I want to play baseball,” said Belinsky, “but I don’t have the desire to be a great champion.”54 At 30 years old, Belinsky had become, according to sportswriter Pat Jordan, “a parody of himself.”55 When asked about his expectations for 1967, Belinsky replied matter-of-factly, “I’d say just hanging around the whole season would be a good year for me.”56 By that measure, his season was a grand success. He even flashed moments of brilliance, such as holding the New York Mets to just two hits and two runs over eight innings in a 3-2 victory in the Astrodome in July. Few could have imagined that it would be Belinsky’s last win in the big leagues.

During spring training with Houston in 1968, Belinsky was more interested in his budding romance with Playboy model and still-married Jo Collins than baseball. Threatening to quit baseball, Belinsky was sold to his former team the Hawaii Islanders, which had become the Chicago White Sox’ affiliate in the PCL. Belinsky was in his element living in Honolulu, surfing, swimming, and imbibing. He also pitched better than expected (9-14 and 2.97 ERA in 176 innings). On August 18, he tossed the first no-hitter in Islanders history, 1-0 against Tacoma, overcoming 10 walks and fanning 10.57

Belinsky returned to winter-league ball in Venezuela for the third and final time in the 1968-69 offseason. He carved out an impressive 1.94 ERA despite a 6-8 record for Navegantes del Magallanes; however, he quit the team in January and subsequently filed a lawsuit for unpaid wage and “moral damages.”58 Meanwhile he had been selected by the St. Louis Cardinals in the Rule 5 draft on December 2, 1968. An antithesis to the Cardinal Way, Belinsky clashed with the conservative, staid reigning World Series champions in spring training, where his now-centerfold wife was a bigger story than himself. “I think I’d have been better off in the Babe Ruth era when this wasn’t such a fragile game,” said Belinsky, miffed that the Cardinals would care what he did away from the park. “[M]aybe I haven’t had the temperament to be a truly dedicated player.”59 At the end of camp the pitcher was sold to Hawaii, which coincidentally had just become an Angels affiliate again.

Playing for Chuck Tanner, a renowned players’ skipper, Belinsky emerged as one of the PCL’s best pitchers. “Bo was a fine person,” said Tanner years later. “I didn’t care about his reputation.”60 The Pittsburgh Pirates, seduced by Belinsky’s 12-5 record and 2.82 ERA, purchased the flamboyant hurler, but it was a toxic match. Maury Allen wrote that Belinsky and Pirates skipper Larry Shepard were like “oil and water.”61 The last thing Shepard wanted was a distraction as the Pirates struggled to play .500 ball. Belinsky pitched sparingly, and poorly, losing all three of his decisions.

Traded to the Cincinnati Reds in the offseason, the 34-year-old Belinsky made his final three big-league appearances. In mid-May, he was optioned to Triple-A Indianapolis, where he was bothered by back pain and left the team in mid-August. Belinsky’s 15-year professional career was over.

Maury Allen described Belinsky as “the reincarnation of Billy Loes.”62 Both were extremely gifted pitchers who critics felt should have won more games. However, that analogy might not be entirely fair to Loes, the eccentric right-hander for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s, who once claimed he’d rather not win 20 games or else management would expect such results every year. Loes (80-63 in parts of 11 seasons) won 50 games and lost just 25 over a four-year stretch (1952-55) with the Dodgers, pitched in three World Series, and was a member of Brooklyn’s only World Series championship. Belinsky had a dismal 28-51 record and logged 665⅓ innings in parts of eight seasons, and was never on a first-place club. “I ended up devoting 15 years of my life to baseball,” said Belinsky, looking back on his career. “Man, I loved it. I just didn’t take it seriously. … I don’t take myself seriously.”63

Already a heavy drinker and drug abuser, Belinsky’s life was careening out of control by the time he was released by the Reds. “I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do,” he said.64 Steve Oney’s account of Belinsky’s life after his playing days, published in Los Angeles Magazine, is harrowing in its details.65 It is a miracle that Belinsky survived the next six years, given his increasingly erratic, abusive, and dangerous behavior. Broke and living in Malibu, he and Jo divorced in 1971, exacerbating his depression and excessive tendencies. Belinsky ran with criminals and pimps, lived with a prostitute, and began using cocaine. There were numerous failed attempts to dry out. Former teammate and lifelong friend Dean Chance intervened and helped Belinsky enter a program at a hospital in Akron, Ohio, in 1972; he had a drink the day he was discharged. The next year Belinsky was once again cast into the national limelight following Maury Allen’s candid best-seller Bo. Pitching and Wooing about the hurler’s life, but the notoriety failed to effect change in his behavior. In 1974 Belinsky relocated to his former stomping grounds, Hawaii, where met Jane Weyerhaeuser. Their marriage in 1975 marked the beginning of Belinsky’s darkest hours, filled with rage and depression fueled by cocaine and alcohol. After giving birth to six-week-premature twins in 1976, Jane returned home while the twins remained in the hospital. Oney described how a high Belinsky “snapped,” brandishing a pistol, and threatened to kill his wife. He eventually shot her through the hip and pointed the gun to his head. Apparently only Jane’s pleas stopped him from committing suicide. Despite her injuries, Jane did not call the police.

Oney points to 1976 as a turning point in Belinsky’s life. He returned to Los Angeles, where he entered a rehab clinic in Santa Monica. Not only did Belinsky dry out, he became a born-again Christian. For the remainder of his life, Belinsky struggled to remain sober, occasionally falling off the wagon, and also battled other inner demons, like his temper. He and Jane divorced in 1981; another marriage, to a waitress in Hawaii, ended in divorce, too, in 1989. Through it all, Belinsky remained active in Alcoholics Anonymous and worked with a psychiatrist from California treating substance-abuse victims.

On November 23 2001, Bo Belinsky died at the age of 64 at his home in Las Vegas and was buried in Paradise Memorial Gardens. The cause of death was a heart attack. Belinsky had been in poor health for several years, and had been treated for bladder cancer, and had undergone hip-replacement surgery. “It’s been a ball,” Belinsky once said about his career in baseball. “There isn’t one regret, not one. I’ve been there. I’ve done everything. I’ve heard the buglers. I’ve lived enough for two lives.”68 On that occasion, the good-looking southpaw with a mean heater and mesmerizing screwball was not exaggerating.

This biography originally appeared in “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors“ (SABR, 2018), edited by Rob Edelman and Bill Nowlin.

Photo Caption

Bo Belinsky, a lover of the Hollywood Fastlane, being mobbed by fans; at his side is an amused Leon Wagner.

Sources

In addition to the sources noted in this biography, the author also accessed the Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Reference.com, the SABR Minor Leagues Database, accessed online at Baseball-Reference.com, and The Sporting News archive via Paper of Record.

Notes

1 Pat Jordan, “Once He Was an Angel,” Sports Illustrated, March 28, 1994: 76. Reprinted article from March 1972.

2 Jonathan Mahler, “He Was no Koufax, But …,” New York Observer, December 12, 2001.

3 Myron Cope, A Dialogue Between Baseball’s Bigmouths,” True. [Dated 1965; player’s Hall of Fame file].

4 Melvin Durslag, “Hero Worship Tough on Bo, His Laundry and Landlady,” The Sporting News, June 16, 1962:44.

5 Jordan: 76.

6 Jordan: 82.

7 Cope: 58.

8 Maury Allen, “Bo Belinsky Reveals: ‘How I Won and Lost Hollywood’s Stars,’” Sport Today, October, 1973: 83.

9 Jordan: 76.

10 Jordan: 82.

11 Steve Oney, Fallen Angel,” Los Angeles Magazine, July 1, 2006. https://lamag.com/longform/fallen-angel-1/.

12 Maury Allen, with the Uncensored Cooperation of Bo Belinsky, Bo: Pitching and Wooing (New York: Dial Press, 1973), 18.

13 Braven Dyer, “Belinsky, Ex-Pool Shark, Pockets Win for Angels,” The Sporting News, May 9, 1962: 20.

14 Allen, Bo: Pitching and Wooing, 32.

15 Jordan: 82.

16 Allen, Bo: Pitching and Wooing, 40.

17 “Litte Rock Southpaw Fans 18 Batters in 11 Innings,” The Sporting News, August 9, 1961: 33.

18 Braven Dyer, “Belinsky, Ex-Pool Shark, Pockets Win for Angels.”

19 Braven Dyer, “Bo’s Success No Surprise to Scout Who ‘Found’ Him,” Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1962: III, 4.

20 All statistics from the Venezuelan League are from Belinsky’s page at Estadisticas Beisbol profesional Venezolano. https://purapelota.com/lvbp/mostrar.php?id=belibo001.

21 Frederico Rodolfo, “Lion Slab Stars Tame Indians in Playoff Triumph,” The Sporting News, February 14, 1962: 31.

22 Braven Dyer, “Belinsky, Ex-Pool Shark, Pockets Win for Angels.”

23 Braven Dyer, “Belinsky Concedes He’s True ‘Screwball,’” Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1962: III, 1.

24 “Word of Advice to Brash Bo,” The Sporting News, June 2, 1962: 12.

25 Braven Dyer, “Soaring Seraphs Sing Bravos for Belinsky,” The Sporting News, May 16, 1962: 21.

26 Braven Dyer, “Belinsky, Ex-Pool Shark, Pockets Win for Angels.”

27 Braven Dyer, “Soaring Seraphs Sing Bravos for Belinsky.”

28 “Rigney Tells Bo to Cut Out ‘Activities,’” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1962: III, 2.

29 Melvin Durslag, “Hero Worship Tough on Bo, His Laundry and Landlady.”

30 Belinsky, Chance Fined After 5 AM Ruckus,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1962: III, 1.

31 ‘Woman Sues Bo Belinsky for $150,000,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1962: I, 32.

32 Braven Dyer, “Bo Belinsky Censured by Haney,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1962: D, 2.

33 Dan Hafner, “Angels Sell Belinsky to A’s for Delivery in ’63,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1962: III, 1.

34 United Press International, “Bo Belinsky Reveals Playboy’s Guide to American After Dark,” Los Angeles Times, Augusts 31, 1962: III, 3.

35 UPI, “Angels Lose Pair — To Yanks, Frick,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1962: III, 1.

36 Howard Thompson, “The Screen: ‘Live a Little’: Youngsters’ Song Fest on Film Begins Run,” New York Times, May 4, 1967: 34.

37 “Bo, Mamie Engaged; No Wedding Date Set,” Los Angeles Times, April 2, 1963: III, 1.

38 Al Wolf, “If Alston Goes, Dressen Next, Not Durocher,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1963: II, 2.

39 Braven Dyer, “Call Him a P(lei)boy Now: Belinsky’s Off to Hawaii,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1963: D1.

40 Ibid.

41 Sid Ziff, “Hickey on Spot,” Los Angeles Times, September 4, 1963: III, 3.

42 Sid Ziff, “Big Train in Puddle,” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 1963: III, 3.

43 Charles Maher, Associated Press, “Belinsky Wants Out,” San Bernardino County Sun (San Bernardino, California). August 14, 1964: 46.

44 Ibid.

45 “Belinsky Punches Writer, Suspended,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1964: II, 1.

46 Allen, Bo: Pitching and Wooing, 197.

47 Allen, Bo: Pitching and Wooing, 311.

48 Allen, “Bo Belinsky Reveals: ‘How I Won and Lost Hollywood’s Stars,’” 22.

49 Paul Zimmerman, “No One Gives Bo a ‘Break,’” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1963: III, 2.

50 Allen, Bo: Pitching and Wooing, 213.

51 Oney.

52 Ibid.

53 “Phils Ship Belinsky to Padres,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1966: III, 4.

54 AP, “Bo Belinsky Plays Baseball for Fun,” Daily Mail (Hagerstown, Maryland), February 9, 1967: 25.

55 Jordan: 78.

56 AP, “Bo Belinsky Plays Baseball for Fun.”

57 AP, “Bo Belinsky Throws No-Hitter for Hawaii,” Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Mirror, August 19, 1968: 8.

58 AP, “Belinsky Suing Baseball Team,” Abilene (Texas) Register-News, June 18, 1969: 9.

59 Bob Broeg, “Belinsky’s Broke, Welcomes Chance With Redbirds,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 23, 1969: 23.

60 Allen, Bo: Pitching and Wooing, 317.

61 Allen, Bo: Pitching and Wooing, 278.

62 Allen, Bo: Pitching and Wooing, 235.

63 Jordan: 82.

64 Allen, Bo: Pitching and Wooing, 302.

65 Oney.

66 UPI, “Bo Belinsky Quiet Member of the Cardinals. Southpaw Talks About His Mental Depression,” Terre Haute (Indiana) Tribune, March 30, 1967: 46.

67 Ibid.

68 Allen, “Bo Belinsky Reveals: ‘How I Won and Lost Hollywood’s Stars,’” 22.

“Berardino is one of those intense fellows who believe the greatest shame in the world is not doing your best every time. He hustles until the last out of every game, and he doesn’t sit around crying about his hard luck.”

Known to generations of television viewers as Dr. Steve Hardy on General Hospital (1963-1996), John Beradino, actor, had, during his early adult life, been Johnny Berardino, baseball player. And his first acting roles came before television was invented.

John Berardino was born in Los Angeles on May 1, 1917. He was the third child born to Ignazio and Anna Musacco Berardino, both natives of Canneto, Rieti, Lazio, Italy, a town on the Adriatic Sea. Ignazio came to the United States in 1905. His mother immigrated in 1911. Ignazio was the foreman at a wholesale meat-packing company. John’s older brother, Joseph, was born in 1914 and his sister, Mary, in 1916. His father died in 1965, and his mother died at 100, on April 5, 1989.

Berardino’s movie career predated his first trip to the Los Angeles playgrounds to play baseball. At the age of 6, he appeared as an extra in three early Hal Roach “Our Gang” films, before sound came to film. His pay amounted to “box lunches that they handed out on the set.” His mother felt he would be the next great child star and persuaded his dad to invest $10,000 in a movie starring the 10-year-old child. But the film was never finished.2 “My dad gave me a bat and said, “Go make like “Push-em-up Tony,” (Tony Lazzeri, like Berardino, an Italian from California, was his hero).’”3 Young Johnny was off to the local playgrounds with a ball and bat. He attended Castelar Grade School and went on to Belmont High School, where he starred in football as well as baseball.

Berardino entered the University of Southern California in the fall of 1935, and served on the Sophomore Class Council during the 1936-37 school year. He was a member of Phi Kappa Tau fraternity. Fred Mosebach of the San Antonio Express, who spoke with Berardino during his minor-league days, wrote that Johnny’s ambition was to become a sportswriter, but the youngster would find his career elsewhere. 4 He had also, during his time at USC, done some acting, but when asked about his acting during a 1939 interview, he was calm and modest, saying, “Just tell ’em I was a tree in the forest scene.”5 By then, his focus was on baseball.

In the spring of his sophomore year, Berardino made the varsity baseball squad as a second baseman, but when he suffered a broken finger fielding a ball, his coach temporarily switched him to the outfield to get him playing time without undue hazard to his finger. Despite the injury, Berardino led the Pacific Coast Collegiate League with a .424 batting average. He was scouted by Willie Butler and signed after that season by Jack Fournier of the St. Louis Browns, a signing protested by USC coach Justin M. “Sam” Barry.6 The Browns sent Berardino to the Johnstown (Pennsylvania) Johnnies of the Class-C Middle Atlantic League. He so impressed the organization that Browns business manager Bill Dewitt said, “He’s been hitting around .325, is exceptionally fast, has a strong arm, and is a good fielder. All our scouts agree that he’s a sure major-league prospect. He’ll probably serve with San Antonio next year.”7 At Johnstown Berardino batted .334 with 38 extra-base hits, 12 of which were home runs.

In spring training with the San Antonio Missions in 1938, Berardino went 5-for-5 with three homers on March 20 as the Missions defeated the Laredo Stars, 13-3.8 During the season he batted .309 as the Missions finished second in the Class-A1 Texas League. He had 41 doubles, two triples, 13 home runs, and 20 stolen bases. Before the season Browns scout Ray Cahill had said, “The lad can’t miss.”9

In May of that season Berardino showed an ability to play while in pain. He played through a game with an injured finger. With his finger taped up, he fielded eight balls at second base and was involved in three double plays. The next day it was determined that the finger was broken.10 When he was injured he was batting over .400. He missed 20 games, but still led the league in chances handled (810) and participated in a league-leading 107 double plays.

After excelling at San Antonio 1938, Berardino was praised by new Browns manager Fred Haney.11 In spring training at San Antonio, Berardino and Sig Gryska, who had set a record for converting double plays the prior season at Mission Field, were pairing up to take their act to the major-league level. Berardino was also showing off his basestealing skills, having stolen three bass in the early spring games.12 Berardino and Gryska got more playing time in the spring as the regular Browns tandem of Don Heffner and Red Kress were holding out.13 Heffner’s holdout continued into April and Berardino took full advantage, getting the nod to start on Opening Day.14

On Opening Day, April 22, 1939, Berardino hit seventh in the batting order and went 1-for-4 against the White Sox at Comiskey Park. In the fourth inning, with the Browns leading 2-1 and runners on second and third, Berardino got his first major-league hit, a single off future Hall of Famer Ted Lyons, driving in the two runners. He hit safely in his first nine major-league games. As April ended, he was batting .333. However, a May slump shot Berardino’s average down to .243. Nevertheless, his manager stuck with him and he was back on top in June, going 31-for-89 (.348) with eight extra-base hits, including his first big-league homer. The third-inning two-run blast on June 29 came off Thornton Lee and helped the Browns thump the White Sox, 9-3. However, Berardino’s efforts were on most days lost in another year of frustration for the Browns. The team finished the season with a 43-111 record, worst in the major leagues. Berardino had a late-season slump and finished his first season with a .256 batting average. He hit five homers and drove in 58 runs in 126 games.

Hopes were high in St. Louis as the 1940 season begun, as their turn to youth was producing some early positive results, not the least of which was Berardino. The optimism was premature. Three games into the season, the record was above .500 (2-1). It was downhill from there. St. Louis quickly fell to eighth place. But from June 4 through July 2, the Browns went 19-12 and were in fifth place, four games below .500. On June 5, Berardino went 4-for-7 and scored the winning run as the Browns defeated the Red Sox 4-3 in 14 innings at Fenway Park. Four days later, at Philadelphia, Berardino homered in each game of a doubleheader, as the Browns swept the pair. The team, however, would revert to its losing ways and lose 14 in a row in July. Berardino had a role in stopping that streak with a game-winning homer on July 19. The team would up with a sixth-place finish (67-87), an improvement over the prior season’s eighth-place result. Berardino improved on his 1939 numbers, raising his average to .258 with career highs in doubles (31) and homers (16). The Browns moved Berardino to shortstop during the season and the results were favorable. Dick Farrington remarked in The Sporting News that “some observers who have watched Berardino freely predict that he will be the best shortstop in the league in another year. He possesses what is known as ‘ball sense’ in tracking down grounders, has ample speed and a fine throwing arm.”15

In the offseason between 1940 and 1941 Berardino was back performing as an actor, working at the Pasadena Playhouse in a performance of A Slight Case of Murder. In 1941, despite some injuries, Berardino played some of his best ball so far. As late as June 5, he was batting above .300, and for the season he would post his best average of his career, .271. Although the Browns (70-84) finished sixth, there was hope that improvement was on the horizon. When Berardino’s name came up in trade rumors, the Browns were quick to stop such speculation. With only five home runs, he managed a career-high 89 RBIs, second best on the team.

And then things changed.

In January 1942, shortly after the United States entered World War II, Berardino enlisted in the US Army Air Corps and went off to Higley Field in Chandler, Arizona, for flight training. Unable to qualify as a flier he was given a discharge and rejoined the Browns. He appeared in 29 games with the team in 1942, but had no set position. He registered only 74 at-bats and had an average of .284. Shortly after the season, he joined the Navy,16 and was stationed at the Naval Air Station at Lambert Field, Missouri.17 He moved on to the Physical Instructors’ School at Bainbridge, Maryland, and then to the Naval Air Station in San Pedro, California, where he managed the facility’s baseball team.18 When the Browns won the 1944 pennant, Brown was stationed at Pearl Harbor. During his time there, he injured his back falling from a jeep.

Berardino returned from the Navy for the 1946 season and had a great start. At the time of the All-Star Game, he was batting over .300 and the Browns were miffed that he wasn’t selected for the All-Star team. He fashioned a career-high 21-game hitting streak from May 30 through June 20. By season’s end, his average had dropped to .265, but he had 39 extra-base hits and 68 RBIs. The Browns, after being as high as third place in early May, slipped back to their customary spot in the second division, finishing in seventh place, 38 games out of first. During the offseason, Berardino resumed acting, performing, and learning at the Pasadena Playhouse.

In 1947 with the Browns, Berardino got off to a terrible start at the plate, and on April 27 he had the dubious distinction of hitting into a triple play against the White Sox. He withstood persistent back pain from his Navy days, but was limited to 90 games by two serious injuries. The more severe injury was a broken arm on June 17 that caused him to miss 35 games. He sustained the injury when hit by a fastball thrown by Dave Ferriss of the Red Sox. At the time of his injury, he was batting only .180. After he returned, his hitting improved, but he was sent to the bench again on August 8 when he was hit on the hand by a pitch thrown by Cleveland’s Allen Gettel. He missed all but one of his team’s next 25 games, but returned to bat .362 in 24 September starts. For the season, he batted .261. His 22 doubles gave him more than 20 doubles in each of his first five full seasons in the major leagues. The Browns, however, were still the Browns, finishing again in last place.

After the 1947 season, the Browns sought to trade Berardino and worked out a trade with the Washington Senators for Jerry Priddy. Berardino saw no advantage in moving from an eighth-place team to a seventh-place team and announced his retirement to seek a full-time film career. His first role was as a horse trainer in the film The Winner’s Circle, featuring jockey Johnny Longden. In announcing his retirement, Berardino said, “I’m getting a seven-year contract from Polimer Studios and it’s a better deal than I could get in baseball. They like my future in the movies and so do I. Anyway, when they start moving you around like cattle without your consent, it’s time to quit baseball. I was never approached on the trade and knew nothing about it until I read it in the papers.”19

However, by the time the film was released on June 8, 1948, Berardino was back on the ball field, this time with a contender. After the deal between St. Louis and Washington fell through, Bill Veeck of the Cleveland Indians wanted to shore up his infield and to strike a pre-emptive blow against the Detroit Tigers, who were looking to acquire Berardino.20 On December 9, 1947, he paid a handsome sum ($65,000) to the Browns for the handsome ballplayer and quickly, at the insistence of Berardino’s film producer, insured John’s face in the event the player suffered a baseball-related injury. Reports differ on the amount of the coverage. Contemporary reports had it at $100,000,21 but more recent accounts showed the amount as $1 million.22 Berardino also had an attendance clause written into his contract. For each 100,000 the Indians drew at home over 2 million spectators, the player would receive $1,000. To owner Veeck, the contract was little more than a publicity gag as the team had never drawn more than 1.6 million, its all-time high having been 1,521,978 in 1947.

Originally, George Metkovich was sent from Cleveland to St. Louis as part of the trade, but the Browns returned Metkovich to Cleveland, when it was determined that he had a broken finger, with the Browns getting $15,000 on top of the initial $50,000 for Berardino. Veeck’s reasoning for the high price tag was, “He’ll be worth the price and then some if one of our regulars goes into a slump or is injured. The way the Red Sox have loaded up for next year’s pennant race, anyone who hopes to catch them will have to be as strong in reserves as on the front line.”23

With Cleveland, Berardino backed up Joe Gordon at second base. He was used sparingly, appearing in 66 games and batting only .190. However, the average is deceiving. He started games at each of the four infield positions and, in spots, Berardino shined. He played in 10 straight games, mostly at second base, from May 25 through June 4, when Gordon was injured. During this time, he batted .344, as the Indians won six of the games. On 18 occasions, including 14 starts between June 27 and July 25, Berardino platooned with Eddie Robinson at first base and played errorless ball.

When shortstop-manager Lou Boudreau was injured in early August, Berardino stepped in for six starts. On August 8 he contributed to both wins in a doubleheader sweep of New York. In the 8-6 first-game win, in front of 73,484 at Cleveland Stadium, he homered off Spec Shea during a five-run sixth inning. He walked and scored ahead of Eddie Robinson’s game-winning two-run homer in the eighth inning. In the nightcap, his seventh-inning sacrifice advanced the winning run to second base.

As September began, it was a three-team race in the American League for the pennant. The Athletics had fallen from contention. The Red Sox were in the lead, but the Yankees and Indians were in close pursuit. Unfortunately for Berardino, his bat went cold in the heat of the pennant race. From August 10 through September 18, he went 0-for-30 and saw his batting average plummet. As September turned into October, the Indians took the league lead and had a chance to clinch the pennant on the final day of the season. However, although Berardino broke his hitless streak with a pinch-hit single, the Indians lost to the Tigers and fell into a tie with the Red Sox. They defeated Boston in a one-game playoff to advance to the World Series, where they defeated the Boston Braves in six games. Berardino did not play in the World Series.

Berardino’s foresight in insisting on the attendance clause in his contract paid off. The Indians drew a record 2,620,627 fans in 1948, and Berardino got a $6,000 bonus. That attendance record stood until 1995.

Berardino was still with the Indians in 1949 and used the season to play with the Indians and do a movie, The Kid From Cleveland, along with his teammates. In the film, starring George Brent, Berardino played a gangster character called Mac. Russ Tamblyn played a troubled youth who was helped by the members of the team. The film’s premiere took place in Cleveland on September 2, 1949.24

Berardino spent his second season with the Tribe once again on the bench, getting into only 50 games. His .198 batting average once again did not show his value to the team. His voice was often heard from the bench by the opposing players and he became highly regarded as a bench jockey. Early Wynn told Berardino, “You got me so mad when I was with Washington (in 1948), that when you got on first base, I tried to throw the ball right at you.” Al Simmons added, “That guy (Berardino) is a dandy. He used to get our (Athletics) players so bothered they’d come back to the bench cussing. Oh, is he rough!”25

During his time with Cleveland, Berardino was noted for his Captain Bligh speech, in which he imitated Charles Laughton’s performance in Mutiny on the Bounty. In a reminiscence in 1998, teammate Bob Lemon said that Berardino was “one of the comrades on the team. He did it all,” Al Rosen added, “He was a thespian. He would jump on a table in the clubhouse and sprinkle water on everybody while giving his Captain Bligh speech.”26

In 1950, Berardino played in only four games with the Indians before being sent to their San Diego affiliate in the Pacific Coast League in May. In June, he was transferred to Sacramento in the same league, and on August 9, he was released by the Indians. He signed with the Pirates and was with them for the balance of 1950, playing in 40 games and batting .206.

After the season, the Pirates released Berardino and he signed with the Browns. A stellar performance during spring training earned him the nod at third base and he played in the first dozen games of 1951, batting .311. He played regularly through May, but his playing time diminished thereafter. His last game of the season was on July 4. When Bill Veeck took over the team on July 5, many players were shown the gate, and Berardino became a coach.27 He was relieved of his coaching duties after the season.

Berardino returned to Cleveland at the beginning of the 1952 season, but not before making a return to movies, appearing as ballplayer Bill Sherdel in The Winning Team, which starred Ronald Reagan as Grover Cleveland Alexander. Prompting the invite to spring training from Cleveland general manager Hank Greenberg was the anticipated loss of players to the military draft during the Korean War. Berardino was clearly underperforming in 35 games with the Indians, going only 3-for-32 before being traded to the Pirates on August 18. He finished his major-league career with the Pirates in September 1952. He went 8-for-56 with four doubles in 19 games with the Pirates, as the Bucs finished in the cellar with a 42-112 record, not much different from his first team, the 1939 Browns.

For his career, Berardino batted .249 with 167 doubles, 23 triples, and 36 home runs. He had 387 RBIs.

Berardino, who was an actor before, during, and after his baseball life, became a full-time actor after the 1952 season. He appeared in more than 25 movies, often in minor uncredited roles (including sitting at a bar in Marty and playing a police sergeant in North by Northwest), but his greatest success came in over 100 roles on the small screen. His early TV credits included I Led Three Lives, in which he appeared as Special Agent Steve Daniels. He appeared on Superman, in The Cisco Kid, and on The Lone Ranger, where he did four episodes (separate outlaw characters) in 1956.

Berardino turned to writing and co-authored scripts with Charissa Hughes for the television series Shotgun Slade, which aired from 1959 through 1961.

In 1960, Berardino returned to the big screen, appearing in Seven Thieves, which starred Edward G. Robinson and involved a caper that took Robinson and his comrades to a heist in Monte Carlo. This time Berardino was on the side of the law, playing a detective. The film received good reviews.

Still in detective garb, he joined the cast of The New Breed on television in 1961 as Sergeant Vince Cavelli, starring alongside Leslie Neilsen. The show was well received by critics but lasted only one season.

Berardino’s big break came in 1963 when he took on the role of Dr. Steve Hardy on television’s General Hospital. The program was the first foray into soap opera for ABC and John Beradino was with the show for 33 years, appearing for the final time one month before his death. In 1973, thinking that daytime performers were undervalued, he championed the cause of the Daytime Emmy Awards.28 The first awards were presented on May 28, 1974. Although he was nominated for an Emmy in each of the first three years, he was not selected for the award.

In 1981, Beradino appeared in the made-for-television movie, Don’t Look Back, the story of 1948 Cleveland Indians teammate Satchel Paige. In 1993, 45 years after receiving his World Series ring and 30 years after the debut of General Hospital, Berardino was awarded a place on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

John married 18-year-old Jeanette Nadine Barritt on November 23, 1941, and they had two children, daughters Antoinette, born in 1942, and Celeste Ruth, born in 1945. They were divorced in March 1955.29 Jeanette died in 1970. On January 20, 1961, he married actress Charissa Hughes, 17 years his junior, with whom he had collaborated as a writer. She died on June 14, 1963. He was married for the third time, to Marjorie Binder, on April 30, 1971. They had a daughter, Katherine (1973-2017), and a son, John Anthony (1974-). Berardino died from pancreatic cancer on May 19, 1996. Berardino’s brother, Joseph, had died in 2002 and his sister, Mary, in 2011.

Actress Rachel Ames, who played Berardino’s wife on General Hospital, talked lovingly of her co-star: “John was like a father confessor to everybody in the cast. He always had a cheery word and liked to tell funny stories. He was a great dancer and loved to ride horses. On breaks between acting, he would play catch.”

This biography originally appeared in “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors“ (SABR, 2018), edited by Rob Edelman and Bill Nowlin.

Photo Caption

Big leaguer John Berardino (on the ballfield) or Beradino (in movies and on TV) enjoyed a healthy big-and-small screen career; he is best-recalled as Dr. Steve Hardy on General Hospital.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author used Baseball-Reference.com, Ancestry.com, the Johnny Berardino player file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and the following:

Drohan, John. “It’s Short Step From Field to Footlights,” The Sporting News, April 4, 1956: 13-14.

Grimes, William. “John Beradino, 79, An Enduring Soap Opera Star,” New York Times, May 22, 1996.

The following articles, although included in the notes, are singled out as being particularly helpful.

Dolgan, Bob. “Two Series Star: After Helping the Indians to the 1948 Title, Berardino Found Fame as Soap Opera Actor,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 23, 1998: 1-C.

Farrington, Dick. “Dark and Handsome Berardino Started in Films — at Six,” The Sporting News, July 13, 1939: 3.

Notes

1 Gordon Cobbledick, “Veeck Applies Psychology in Reshuffling Roommates,” The Sporting News, March 10, 1948: 4.

2 Eirik Knudsen, “Beradino, on ‘Hospital’ for 25 years, Operated in the Infield for ’48 Tribe,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 5, 1988: TV Week-2.

3 Jeanie Chung, “Player-Turned-Actor Is Just What Doctor Ordered,” Baseball Weekly, May 23, 1991.

4 Fred Mosebach, “John Berardino of San Antonio Missions,” The Sporting News, October 27, 1938: 10.

5 Dick Farrington, “Dark and Handsome Berardino Started in Films at Six: But with Eye on Lazzeri, Brown Rookie Landed on Diamond,” The Sporting News, July 13, 1939: 3.

6 “Browns Signing of Collegian Brings Kick From Coast Coach,” The Sporting News, June 17, 1937: 2.

7 Carl Felker, “Long Rookie String Lined Up by Browns,” The Sporting News, September 9, 1937: 2.

8 “Missions Win Over Laredo Stars,” Dallas Morning News, March 21, 1938: II-2.

9 “New Brownies Recruit: John Berardino,” The Sporting News, January 19, 1939: 1.

10 Ibid.

11 “Mixing Old With New to Paint Brown Picture in Brighter Hue,” The Sporting News, April 6, 1939: 1.

12 Brown Byrd, “Browns Taking on Rose-Colored Tint: Gryska, Berardino Develop into Nifty Keystone Combination,” The Sporting News, March 30, 1939: 12.

13 Farrington, “Brownies May Fit Kids Into Keystone,” The Sporting News, March 9, 1939: 2.

14 Byrd, “Berardino Scheduled to Open at Second Base for Brownies,” The Sporting News, April 6, 1939: 2.

15 Farrington, “Berardino Browns’ Tall Man at Short,” The Sporting News, September 5, 1940: 2.

16 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 29, 1942: 4B.

17 The Sporting News, June 3, 1943: 11.

18 “In the Service,” The Sporting News, May 11, 1944: 14.

19 Shirley Povich, “Swap for Berardino Turns Into Movie Shocker for Nats,” The Sporting News, December 3, 1947: 10.

20 Bill Veeck (with Ed Linn), Veeck as in Wreck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 148.

21 Associated Press, “Berardino Gets Face Insured,” Sandusky (Ohio) Register, January 5, 1948: 5.

22 Veeck, 134.

23 Ed McAuley, “Movie Actor Berardino Gets Into Cleveland Picture,” The Sporting News, December 17, 1947: 11.

24 McAuley, “Indians’ Reel Roles Marked by Realism: New Film Is Well Received at Cleveland Premiere; Diamond Sequences Good; Veeck in Prominent Part,” The Sporting News, September 14, 1949: 19.

25 Hal Lebovitz, “Active-Sub Berardino Rates High as Jockey,” The Sporting News, May 10, 1950: 16.

26 Bob Dolgan, “Two Series Star: After Helping Indians to the 1948 Title, Berardino Found Fame as a Soap Opera Actor,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 23, 1998: 1C.

27 Ray Gillespie, “One Team Playing, One Coming, One Going,” The Sporting News, August 8, 1951: 4.

28 Jerry Buck, Associated Press, “Daytime Opera Performers Want to Compete for Awards,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 11, 1973: 22E.

29 Associated Press. “Berardino Is Sued for Divorce Third Time,” Sacramento (California) Bee, March 2, 1955: 28.

No word better describes Bobby Bonilla’s baseball career than “potential.” He was selected as an All-Star six times. Bonilla won three Silver Slugger Awards while a Pirate. Toward the end of his career, he helped lead the Florida Marlins to an improbable World Series triumph. In spite of all this success, Bonilla seemed trapped inside a bubble of bigger expectations.

Standing 6-feet-3 and weighing 210 to 240 pounds, Roberto Martin Antonio “Bobby” Bonilla was always a big man from the time he began playing professional baseball. He was similar in build to two former Auburn University football players, Frank Thomas and Bo Jackson, who like Bonilla tantalized Chicago White Sox fans with their potential to put a big hurt on every baseball. Bonilla was not a finesse hitter, or even a traditional home-run hitter. “He simply muscled the ball with the brute strength of an offensive tackle, which he resembled in appearance,” one writer explained.2

There is great irony in the pressure for Bonilla to achieve even more than he did. When Bobby was born on February 23, 1963, the area dominated by the Jackson Houses of the South Bronx was not a neighborhood full of high expectations. Puerto Rican families, mostly low income, were pouring into the Bronx in huge numbers. The Bronx has been the political bulwark of nationally ground-breaking Puerto Rican politicians including Herman Badillo, Fernando Ferrer, and Jose Serrano. The Bronx is the second largest population area of Puerto Ricans, behind only San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Bonilla is of Afro-Puerto Rican heritage, his parents having moved to the Bronx from Puerto Rico. Roberto Sr. was an electrician and Regina, his mother, was a psychologist. They divorced when Bobby was 8. He, his twin sisters, Socorro and Milagros, and his brother, Javier, grew up living with their mother. His father lived only five minutes away. Bonilla said that “he was always there if I needed him.”3 Both parents worked to instill values in him though actions and words. His father took Bobby on electrical jobs to demonstrate how hard he had to work as well as the dangers of his job, and then, according to Bonilla, would ask, “Is this what you want to do?” and Bobby would reply “No, Dad, I’ll work at my baseball a little harder.”4 

His home area was the infamous 40th Police Precinct, known for its homicides and robberies and not many success stories. Bonilla said that he “had my sports.” “It kept me away from the drugs, the gangs,” he told Ross Newhan of the Los Angeles Times.5 Amidst the chaos, Bobby focused on baseball. He told People magazine that he “played sports 24 hours a day. In a place like the South Bronx, you have to dream or else you’ll get caught up in the mess.”6 His life in the Bronx led to one of his oft-repeated phrases when people asked him if criticism, booing fans or batting slumps were “pressure.” He’d say: “This isn’t pressure. Pressure is growing up in the South Bronx.”7 

Not only did Bobby have his family to keep him focused, but he had an extraordinary high-school baseball coach, Joe Levine. Beyond just helping develop Bonilla as a high-school player, Levine put him in the position to launch an improbable and extraordinary major-league career. The coach attended a seminar at which a high-school all-star team was being assembled to play in Scandinavia in the summer of 1980. High-school senior Bonilla was selected for the team, but did not have the money needed to go. His coach started a “Bobby Fund” to assist Roberto Sr. in paying for the summer trip. It is no wonder that Bonilla considered Coach Levine a second father.8  

The coordinator and instructor for the trip was legendary baseball scout Syd Thrift. Thrift had spent nearly 20 years as the scouting coordinator of Pittsburgh Pirates, Kansas City Royals, and Oakland Athletics but had left baseball and was working during this nine-year stretch as a real estate agent. Here’s how Thrift described the trip: “It was the season of the midnight sun. We all slept in one big room. There were no shades on the windows and the sun never set. It was the most bizarre thing you ever saw.” 9 But it gave Thrift plenty of daylight to see Bobby Bonilla’s potential.

Upon returning, Thrift called one of his old bosses, Pirates minor-league director Branch Rickey Jr., and within weeks of returning, Bonilla was at the Pirates’ spring home in Bradenton, Florida for a tryout.10 Bonilla was not an instant success story in minor-league baseball. He spent his first two years with the Pirates’ rookie league team, hitting barely above the Mendoza line though occasionally flashing his potential power. At age 20, in 1983 at the Class-A level, Bonilla began to show improved skills so the Pirates advanced him to Nashua of the Double-A Eastern League in 1984. There he again slightly improved his power, average, and speed even though he had risen to a higher level in the minors.

In 1985 Bonilla was invited to spring training with the Pirates in Bradenton. He was getting his breakout chance, but Bonilla broke his leg in a collision with Bip Roberts while chasing a foul popup. He could have given up but did not. Bonilla credited his wife, Millie, his high-school sweetheart, with “keeping his head straight.” “I was a big baby in a lot of ways,” Bonilla said. “I had to learn to cope while wanting to be home. I earned $650 a month and spent $200 calling Millie. She picked up a lot of the slack. She kept my head straight.”11 The Pirates sent him back down to Class A with Prince William (Carolina League). There he met Barry Bonds, who was to become his closest friend in baseball.

In the winter of 1983-84, Bonilla had played his first baseball in his parents’ native home of Puerto Rico. He was still a raw minor-league player when he joined the Senadores de San Juan. Mako Oliveras had taken over as manager and immediately liked the personable Bonilla. Since Bonilla had nowhere to stay, Oliveras asked his mother if Bobby could stay with them. He did so for two winters, where he loved the food and became part of their family.12

 Bonilla played four additional seasons in the Puerto Rican Winter League. Before the 1984-85 season, the Indios de Mayaguez traded shortstop Adalberto Pena and pitcher Orlando Lind to San Juan for Bonilla. Assistant general manager Jorge Aranzamendi, based upon all the major-league scouting reports he had access to, supported going after prospect Bonilla because of his potential. While Pena helped lead San Juan to a championship, Bonilla was not a regular starter on Mayaguez until 1985-86.13 Bonilla credited the Puerto Rican Winter League with advancing his skills. He had short high-school baseball seasons in New York City, so he entered minor-league ball without much game experience. After his spring-training injury in 1985, and his demotion back to Class A, the winter of 1985-86 was of great importance to his major-league career. His solid statistics during the last 39 games of the season at Prince William reflected improving skills that resulted in his starting for Mayaguez.

Based upon his broken leg and partial season in Class A, the Pirates had left Bonilla off their 40-man roster in the fall. They presumed that no team would select him in the Rule 5 draft because it would require placing an inexperienced, possibly damaged player on the 25-player roster for the season or potentially losing him.  The Chicago White Sox had the advantage of being able to select the unprotected Bonilla after he had demonstrated recovery not only in a few months of minor-league baseball but also with the Indios in winter ball. For $50,000 the White Sox received a soon-to-be major-league star.

Bonilla astoundingly jumped from Class A to the majors without missing a beat. In 75 games for the White Sox,his .256 batting average slightly exceeded his best year in the minors and his on-base percentage and slugging average were roughly equal to his previous bests. No wonder Bonilla said that playing Puerto Rican Winter League baseball was particularly important to him because he skipped Triple A. Puerto Rico had been a critical training ground to maturing and developing his skills.

Bonilla had a friend who had never forgotten him: Syd Thrift. Thrift had been enticed back into baseball by the Pirates, who appointed him general manager. Thrift hired the White Sox third-base coach, Jim Leyland, to be the manager. In midseason the Pirates reacquired Bonilla for pitcher Jose DeLeon. In 2013 ESPN ranked each major-league team’s best deadline trade. For the Pirates, it was receiving Bonilla for DeLeon.14

Bonilla returned to Indios de Mayaguez for the 1986-87 winter season.  Post-season he was selected play for the Puerto Rican entry in the 1987 Caribbean Series held in Hermosillo, Mexico along with other major-league players Candy Maldonado and Juan Nieves, as were future stars Roberto Alomar and David Cone. Because of his Puerto Rican heritage, in the winter leagues and for the national team, Bobby Bonilla was classified as a Puerto Rican native player.15 In retirement Bonilla has continued to support baseball efforts in Puerto Rico, including the Puerto Rico Baseball Academy that produced Houston Astros star Carlos Correa.16

In 1987 for the Pirates, Bonilla showed the first signs of a major breakout. He hit .300 (his previous high had been .269), topped 10 home runs for the first time, and slugged .481. He played his last year of winter ball for Mayaguez in 1987-88. In 1988 Bonilla hit 24 home runs and had 100 RBIs. The Pirates excelled as well, as Thrift built a powerhouse upon the ruins of the cocaine-devastated Pirates. From 1988 to 1991, Bonilla averaged 24 home runs, 38 doubles, 102 RBIs, and a 4.4 WAR. While Bonds was the top star with a Wins Above Replacement (WAR) average of 7.9, Bonilla was among the best players in the majors. In 1988, at the start of Bonilla’s outburst, Philadelphia Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt said, “He’s the best all-around third baseman in the league.”17

The Pirates had become the dominant team in the majors, winning three straight division titles in 1990, 1991, and 1992. Bonilla finished second in the National League’s 1990 MVP voting (behind teammate Bonds) and third in 1991 (Bonds was second to Terry Pendleton of the NL Champion Atlanta Braves). The Spring 1991 issue of Topps Baseball Card magazine featured Bonilla and Bonds on the cover, calling them the “Killer B’s.”18 Topps correctly realized that the double B’s of Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla, combined with their first-second and second-third place MVP finishes, and the Pirates’ natural bee-colored black and gold uniforms, made the duo the perfect “Killer B’s” of all time.

Bonilla was not with the Pirates during the 1992 championship season. His life had started to take a bad turn during the 1991 season as his coming free agency began to raise dissatisfaction about money. Bonilla had always been known for having a “neon” smile. People magazine stated: “Perhaps not since Ernie (‘It’s a great day for a ballgame’) Banks retired from the Chicago Cubs 17 years ago has baseball seen a man with a sunnier disposition swing a meaner bat.” A teammate said it was nice to come to the ballpark and see his smiling face.19

Money had become a proxy for not only skill but respect. The Pirates had been a home to African American stars, and had fielded the first all-black lineup in 1971, anchored by Puerto Rican legend Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell. However, Bonilla felt that teammate Andy Van Slyke and others were given large contract offers while the Pirates would not meet his request. The Yankees were interested in either Bonds or Bonilla but were rumored to prefer Bonilla because of his upbeat attitude.20

However, it was not the Yankees, but the New York Mets that brought Bobby Bonilla home to New York City. The Mets signed Bonilla to the highest dollar contract ever in the major leagues at the time, $5 million for five years. New York is considered a tough sports town, with many opinionated sports journalists competing for the attention of millions of opinionated and passionate sports fans. Bonilla, as the newly minted richest man in baseball, was going to have a bullseye on his head even if he performed well.

Barry Bonds accurately framed the difference between himself and his good friend. “I can handle New York because I don’t get my feelings hurt the way Bobby does. I don’t give a __ what people write about me or say. Bobby does. He’s too sensitive. I told him before he went there that he wasn’t going to be able to deal with it but he didn’t believe me. Now, he believes me.”21

Bonilla’s return home started like the dream he hoped it would be. On February 3, 1992, he and his wife established the Millie and Bobby Bonilla Public School Fund. Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer proclaimed the day Bobby Bonilla Day, stating what a great pleasure it was “to welcome back the four-star slugger of the South Bronx.” Surrounded by Mets officials and teacher union representatives, Bonilla pledged to donate $500 for each RBI he got for sports equipment and incentive programs to the Bronx schools he attended. It was expected to be around $50,000 because Bonilla had become a reliable 100 RBIs-a-year player. Lehman High School was not represented at the ceremony because the principal had fired Bonilla’s beloved former coach Levine. Instead, Levine spoke at the ceremony and the New York Times noted that he would be the “unofficial administrator of the fund.”22

From there, things went downhill. Bonilla sank back to the mediocre performance level of his first year — he was hitting only .130 in May — only now he was the highest paid player in baseball. He improved but still drove in only 70 runs, largely because the weak Mets lineup had 31 percent fewer runners for him to potentially drive in.23 Regardless of the reasons, fans were focused upon his underperformance compared with his record-breaking salary. He was scalded in New York, where he took to wearing earplugs, and his baseball homecoming to Pittsburgh was a disaster, including having a bottle thrown at him. The Mets imploded. Then it got worse.

The days of fawning sports reporters was over. The adoring public was no longer so adoring but more sarcastic. The title of the book The Worst Team Money Could Buy suggests the views of the author about the 1992 Mets.24 The generally ebullient Bonilla was already upset with the world and upset with himself. He said later that he perhaps should have handled the criticism better, but when he was called out for lying about his attempt to reverse an error call on what he thought was a hit, the festering wounds to his pride were picked open. The powerful Bonilla physically intimidated the less imposing author/New York Daily News baseball reporter Klapisch by threatening to “show him the Bronx.”25 It was ironic since Bonilla had specifically separated himself from the more violent part of the Bronx his entire life, but the image of sunny Bobby never quite recovered.  

After his poor performance in 1992, Bonilla recovered to have a solid season for the Mets in 1993, as well as in the strike-shortened seasons of 1994 and the first half of 1995. He was named to the NL All-Star team in 1993 and 1995. His statistics averaged over a full season were just shy of his annual performances in Pittsburgh. But now his personal image had been damaged, and his contract had raised expectations to levels he could not achieve.

 In late July of 1995 the Mets traded their All-Star slugger to the Baltimore Orioles for two minor-leaguers. Bonilla, clearly glad to escape, drove to Baltimore that night in order to be in the lineup against the White Sox.26 He hit extremely well for the Orioles in 1995, batting .333 with a slugging average of .544 and an RBI rate of 123 in a 162-game season. He followed that with another solid season in 1996. Bonilla was one of the reasons the Orioles made the 1996 American League playoffs as the wild-card team. He hit a game-sealing grand slam in the first game against the Cleveland Indians, and then homered again in the decisive fourth game. Baltimore defeated the Indians three games to one but was easily subdued by the Yankees in the ALCS.

When his season concluded, Bonilla was again a free agent. He signed with the Florida Marlins, where he was reunited with his former Pirates manager Jim Leyland. In 1997 he batted .297 with 39 doubles, 96 RBIs, and 17 homers. The Marlins’ owner, Wayne Huizenga, had decided to open his checkbook, not only for Bonilla but also for Moises Alou, Alex Fernandez, and Jim Eisenreich. The Marlins made the NL playoffs as the wild-card team. It was Bonilla’s fourth trip to the playoffs. This time the Marlins won the World Series, against Cleveland.

After the World Series victory, Huizenga, a trash magnate, trashed his team. He sold, failed to re-sign, or traded most of the key players. The Marlins went from first to worst, finishing 1998 with a 54-108 record. In May 1998 Bonilla was traded, along with Gary Sheffield and three others, to the Los Angeles Dodgers for Mike Piazza and Todd Zeile, who were then flipped as well. Bonilla’s glory days were gone. His hitting collapsed (.249 for the season) and he was bounced to the Mets for Mel Rojas after the season.

At this late stage of his career, Bonilla was not a hitting asset but was more like a good-luck charm. For the 2000 season, he signed with the Atlanta Braves. They won their ninth straight division title. He was not re-signed. For 2001, at age 38, he played in 93 games for the St. Louis Cardinals, who won the NL wild-card slot. They were eliminated by the eventual World Series champion Arizona Diamondbacks. Bonilla’s stellar playing career ended much as it had begun.  It was an arc, beginning in 1981 with the Pirates Rookie League team, for which he hit .217, and finishing with a .213 batting with the Cardinals 20 years later.   

However, it did not end the baseball legend of Bobby Bonilla. In 1999, his last year with the Mets, Bonilla had agreed to have his contract bought out and accepted deferred payments that would begin in 2011 and continue until 2035. On July 1 of each year he receives a check for $1,193,248.20 from the Mets on what the media refers to as “Bobby Bonilla Day.” Some refer to him as the “Patron Saint of Bad Contracts,” and others refer to players who also are receiving deferred paychecks long after retirement as the “Bobby Bonilla All-Stars.”

Since Bonilla has not played for the Mets since the last century, the fact that his annuity exceeds the salary, for example, of any of the 2016 Mets’ top four pitching stars — Noah Syndergaard, Jacob DeGrom, Matt Harvey, and Steven Matz — causes lots of tsk-tsking by the media and fans. Of course, when Bonilla was slugging away as a youngster for the Pirates he was not earning the big money either. More importantly, even though the Mets will have paid Bonilla $29.8 million for the 2000 season in which he was not on the team, the deal was both logical at the time and worked out well for the Mets. The biggest problem was scam artist Bernie Madoff. Mets owner Fred Wilpon was one of the investors Madoff defrauded of $17 billion for which he was sentenced to 150 years in prison. Wilpon had been receiving 10-15 percent annual gains. Had he earned even 10 percent on the $5.9 million owed Bonilla in 2000, by 2035 Wilpon would have netted a $49 million profit. In attempts to recover losses, Wilpon was sued but found innocent of any crime. He was guilty only of a combination of misplaced trust and economic ignorance.27

The cash freed up by the Bonilla deferred deal resulted in the signing of Derek Bell, Todd Zeile, and Mike Hampton. They helped lead the Mets to the National League title in 2000. Hampton earned the MVP of the NL Championship Series by pitching 16 shutout innings. When Hampton then signed with the Colorado Rockies, the Mets received as compensation a young ballplayer named David Wright, who developed into one of the 10 best Mets players ever.28

Bonilla had one other unique side of his personality: He had some minor success as an actor. Bonilla, Bonds, and Pedro Guerrero all had bit parts in the 1993 baseball movie Rookie of the Year. The movie is the story of a 12-year-old boy who, after hurting his arm, finds that the surgically repaired arm enables him to throw a baseball over 100 miles per hour. This results in his being signed by the Chicago Cubs and sparking them to a World Series victory. He reinjures his arm and returns to Little League baseball, only sporting a World Series ring.

The brief appearance of Bonilla is in one of the scenes that adds the patina of authenticity to the movie. The first is the day at Wrigley Field, filmed at the ballpark, when young Henry Rowengartner (Thomas Ian Nicholas) returns an opposing team’s home run toward the field, only it goes to the catcher at home plate on the fly. Later, after his shaky early start, the “rookie” pitcher becomes a key part of the Cubs turnaround. Showing actual baseball players Bonilla, Guerrero, and Bonds swinging mightily, and late, on the alleged fastballs of the 12-year-old pitcher was a shortcut way to establish Henry’s importance to the Cubs success. The ballplayers in the scene were billed as “The Big Whiffers.”

The movie had mini-cult status among Cub fans desperate to win. Nicholas was invited to toss out the first pitch at a Cubs game in 2010, and to sing the National Anthem in 2015. After the Cubs won Game Seven of the 2016 World Series, he tweeted out the final shot from Rookie of the Year, when he held his World Series ring up to the camera.

The personable Bonilla was also interviewed on nontraditional baseball shows including the Late Night With David Letterman and Lauren Hutton and… He also appeared in three television series. In 1994 Bobby was “Ronnie Holland” in the episode “The Friendly Neighborhood Dealer” on the Fox series New York Undercover. The series ran from 1994 to 1998, starring Michael DeLorenzo and Malik Yoba as NYPD detectives. DeLorenzo, like Bonilla, was of Puerto Rican descent and from the Bronx.

In 1995 Bonilla appeared on Living Single in an episode titled “Play Ball.” The series was carried five years by Fox, ranking among the top five shows among African-Americans. Among its stars were Queen Latifah, Kim Fields, and Kim Coles. In 1998 Bonilla and Tony LaRussa appeared in the episode “The American Game” on the HBO television series Arli$$. While it was critically panned, Time magazine reported that so many viewers claimed Arli$$ was the sole reason they subscribed to HBO that it remained on the year for seven seasons.

By any standard, young Roberto Martin Antonio “Bobby” Bonilla of the South Bronx achieved his potential.

Last revised: June 1, 2017

This biography originally appeared in “Puerto Rico and Baseball: 60 Biographies” (SABR, 2017), edited by Bill Nowlin and Edwin Fernández. It also appeared in “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors“ (SABR, 2018), edited by Rob Edelman and Bill Nowlin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author utilized Baseball-Reference.com for all baseball statistics and the website IMDb.com for information on Bonilla’s movie and TV career.

Notes

1 Ross Newhan, “An Act of Piracy: Getting Bonilla Back Was a Steal,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1988.

2 Bob Klapisch and John Harper, The Worst Team Money Could Buy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 2005), 75.

3 Newhan.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Eric Levin and Mary Huzinec, “Save That Ball, Boys — The Way Bobby Bonilla’s Going, It’ll Be Valuable,” People magazine, July 18, 1988.

7 Ken Rappoport, Bobby Bonilla (New York: Walker and Company, 1993), 91

8 Kenneth Shouler, “Swinging for the Fences,” Cigar Aficionado, July/August 1998; Newman, “Act of Piracy.”

10 Shouler.

11 Newhan.

12 Thomas E. Van Hyning, Puerto Rico’s Winter League: A History of Major League Baseball’s Launching Pad (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1995), 29.

13 Ibid. 

14 proxy.espn.com/blog/sweetspot/tag?name=bobby-bonilla.

16 “MLB to Start Puerto Rico Summer League for 14-17-Year-Olds,” Fox Sports, June 19, 2014.

17 Levin and Huzinec.

18 While some have included Sid Bream and Jay Bell among the Pirates’ “Killer B’s” and others later stretched the term to the powerful Houston “B’s” (Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, and Derek Bell), the term fit perfectly on Bonilla and Bonds.

19  Ibid.

20 Jon Heyman, “Yankees Are Targeting Bonds or Bonilla,” Newsday (Long Island, New York), January 13, 1991.

21 John Feinstein, Play Ball: The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball (New York: Villard Books, 1993), 26.

22 Bruce Weber, “Bobby Bonilla Puts His Bat to Work,” New York Times, February 4, 1992.

23 Neil Paine, “Bobby Bonilla Was More Than the Patron Saint of Bad Contracts,” FiveThirtyEight.com, September 30, 2016.

24 Klapisch and Harper.

25 Rappoport, 286.

26 Buster Olney, “All-Star Slugger Acquired From Mets for Minor-Leaguers Ochoa and Buford Orioles Get Their Cleanup Man: Bonilla,” Baltimore Sun, July 29, 1995.

27 theundefeated.com/features/bobby-bonilla-was-more-than-just-that-mets-contracts-538/; Serge Kovaleski and David Waldstein, “Madoff Had Wide Role in Mets’ Finances,” New York Times, February 1, 2011; and Darren Royal, “Why the Mets Pay Bobby Bonilla $1.19 Million Every July 1,” ESPN; July 1, 2016.

28 Mel Antonen, “Deferred Payment: Mets Owe Bobby Bonilla Nearly $30 Million From 2011-2035,” USA Today; updated July 1, 2010; Ted Berg, “The Annual Deferred Payments to Bobby Bonilla Actually Worked Out Quite Well for the Mets,” USA Today; July 1, 2015.

Chuck Connors was a career minor-league ballplayer who played portions of two seasons in the major leagues, with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1949 and Chicago Cubs in 1951. Connors gained greater fame as one of the very few ballplayers who was a successful actor in his post-baseball career, best known for his role as Lucas McCain in the TV show The Rifleman. He also appeared in more than 50 movies during his lengthy acting career. Connors was also one of the few men who played both major-league baseball and basketball (with the Boston Celtics in 1946-47).

“I owe baseball all that I have and much of what I hope to have,” Connors said in 1953 when he retired as a ballplayer. “Baseball made my entrance to the film industry immeasurably easier than I could have made it alone. To the greatest game in the world I shall be eternally in debt.”1 For Connors, the turning point in his life came during spring training in 1951 when the Chicago Cubs demoted him to their Los Angeles Angels farm club in the Pacific Coast League. “Greatest break I ever got,” Connors said in 1954. “I’m out there right in the middle of the movie business where, if a guy has anything, he’s got the chance to break in.”2

Kevin Joseph Aloysius Connors was born on April 10, 1921, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the only son of Allan and Marcella Connors, Irish natives who came to the United States via Newfoundland. Connors had one sibling, his sister Gloria. Connors grew up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where his parents struggled to eke out a living during the Great Depression of the 1930s. His father was unemployed for much of the decade, as his mother supported the family by scrubbing floors in office buildings; his father eventually found work as a night watchman. Connors said that growing up poor in his pre-adolescent years motivated him to work hard to achieve success as a ballplayer and later as an actor.

While he attended public schools as a youngster, Connors played on the sports teams sponsored by a local boys club, the Bay Ridge Celtics. John Flynn, who coached the teams, helped Connors gain a sports scholarship to Adelphi Academy, a private high school in Brooklyn, where he played football, basketball, and baseball. In his senior year at Adelphi, Connors was named the first baseman on the Brooklyn Eagle all-scholastic baseball team. “Because of baseball, I got a good education,” Connors said later in life. “The coach [at Adelphi] was a former Southeastern Conference heavyweight boxing champion, Hollis Botts. He was a first baseman playing semi-pro ball on the weekends and coaching our team, so I was in good hands, both in sports and in school work.”3

Following his graduation from Adelphi in June 1940, Connors pursued his dream to play for his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers when he signed a minor-league contract with the Dodgers. The Brooklyn Eagle gushed that it had “spotted a successor to Dolph Camilli,” then the incumbent Dodgers first baseman, in the first of many rosy forecasts for Connors to achieve greatness with the Dodgers.4 The Dodgers assigned Connors to their Newport, Arkansas, farm team at the bottom of the minor-league ladder, the Class-D Northeast Arkansas League. Connors played just four games for Newport, batting 1-for-11, before he changed his mind about professional baseball in favor of playing sports in college.

After he voluntarily retired from baseball following his short stint in the Dodgers organization, Connors attended Seton Hall College on a baseball scholarship. He played first base on the undefeated Seton Hall baseball team in the spring of 1942, which compiled an 11-0 record. A highlight for Connors that season was Seton Hall’s 6–5 come-from-behind victory over Fordham on May 11, when Seton Hall scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth inning to win. As reported in the New York Times the next day, Seton Hall tied the score in that ninth inning when “Lacika scored on Connors’ Texas Leaguer.”

Although Connors often voiced an “aw shucks” attitude about his lack of formal training as an actor, his Seton Hall education provided the foundation for his oratory skills. After being goaded into participating in a declamatory contest, he chose to recite Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Congo,” which was a complex verse concerning Mumbo-Jumbo the God of the Congo. When the judges declared Connors the winner, he was hooked on the performing arts.

Connors also played varsity basketball at Seton Hall during the winter of 1941-42. He was the backup center on the team led by Bob Davies, who went on to a stellar career as a pro player and enshrinement in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Seton Hall coach John “Honey” Russell inserted Connors into several games that winter to spell starting center Ken Pine. Connors scored a career-high six points on December 30, 1941, in Seton Hall’s 59-15 rout of Maryland. “I wasn’t a bad basketball player, but I was far from the world’s greatest,” Connors told biographer David Fury. “Good defense, no offense, that was me.”5 In 1942, the lanky Connors, who stood 6-foot-6, had more promise as a baseball player than as a basketball player, especially after he hit .360 for the Burlington, Vermont, ball club in the semi-pro Northern League during the summer of 1941.

During the summer of 1942, Connors wound up in the minor-league organization of the New York Yankees. The story goes that famed Yankees scout Paul Krichell signed Connors to a minor-league contract after he spotted his name on a list of unprotected minor-league players. Krichell may have seen Connors play for Seton Hall in nearby South Orange, New Jersey (other stories have Krichell scouting him at Adelphi and even arranging for his scholarship to Seton Hall.) However, the Yankees signed Connors in June of 1942 after he played for the Fraser Stars in Lynn, Massachusetts, a ball club in the semi-pro New England League. Connors, whose “work in college circles has been so outstanding that a number of big-league clubs are seeking his services,” played only three weeks in Lynn before signing with the Yankees.6 Why Connors did not return to his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers is unknown. The Yankees assigned Connors to their Norfolk, Virginia, farm club in the Class-B Piedmont League, where he batted .264 in 72 games.

In October 1942 Connors enlisted in the Army, where he spent the next three years state-side as a tank training instructor while the United States fought World War II. After his initial assignment to Camp Campbell in Kentucky, Connors was assigned to West Point, 50 miles north of his native Brooklyn. On weekends during the warm weather, Connors played semi-pro baseball in the New York City area, often with the Bushwick team in Brooklyn. During the colder months, he played pro basketball in the American Basketball League for the Brooklyn Indians (1943-44), Wilmington Bombers (1944-45), and Paterson Crescents (1945-46). Connors became more of a scorer during his wartime basketball years, averaging 6.1 points per game in 27 games for Wilmington and 8.8 points per game in 18 games for Paterson. During the war years, Connors concluded that he could make a decent living postwar as a year-round professional athlete, playing baseball from spring until fall and basketball during the winter. His plan was not all that unusual for the time period, because many athletes played multiple professional sports in the 1930s and 1940s.

In the war years, Connors also acquired the nickname “Chuck,” which soon usurped his given name Kevin. The oft-told story that the nickname originated from his Seton Hall days, where first-baseman Connors was fond of saying to his infielders, “Chuck it to me, baby. Chuck it to me!” is likely apocryphal.7 This story was told by his sister Gloria, in a 1997 biography of Connors. More probable is the explanation that Connors gave in the early 1980s: “They called me Chuck when I started playing baseball because they thought Kevin was effeminate.”8 Since its first published instance was in 1945, the nickname came from his days in semi-pro baseball.9 In 1949 the Brooklyn Eagle reported that Connors was called Chuck “after the old Bowery character of the same name,” which makes sense since Connors played semi-pro baseball mostly in the New York City area.10 The original Chuck Connors, a talkative, shadowy character that was a political boss, was immortalized in the 1933 movie The Bowery, where Wallace Beery played tough-guy Connors in the rough-and-tumble world of the Lower East Side.11 Chuck was the perfect nickname for a hard-nosed baseball player.

After Connors was discharged from the Army in February 1946, he immediately joined the Rochester Royals of the National Basketball League, which had greater stature than did the ABL. Connors played in 14 games for the Royals, scoring 28 points, before he left the club in early March to go to baseball spring training with the Yankees. Rochester went on to win the NBL title that spring, establishing a lengthy pattern of Connors playing on championship teams as a postwar athlete.

Connors found his way back to the Brooklyn Dodgers organization during spring training of 1946 after the Yankees asked waivers on him to move him down from their top minor-league farm club in Newark, New Jersey. Brooklyn picked up Connors off the waiver wire and assigned him to the Dodgers farm club in Newport News, Virginia, of the Class-B Piedmont League. Connors hit 17 home runs in 1946 to lead the Piedmont League and establish himself as a prime prospect to be the first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Newport News won the Piedmont League playoffs, the first of four consecutive championship minor-league baseball teams that Connors played on.

Returning to professional basketball in the fall of 1946, Connors played in the Basketball Association of America, a new league that competed with the established National Basketball League (the two leagues merged after the 1948-49 season to form today’s National Basketball Association). With his former Seton Hall coach, Honey Russell, at the helm of the Boston Celtics club in the BAA, Connors signed to play with the Celtics for the inaugural 1946-47 season. Connors averaged 4.6 points per game in 49 games for the Celtics that season. He was no major offensive threat, as he sank less than one in four field-goal attempts (94-for-380) and less than half of his free throws (39-for-84). Connors later explained his primary role with the Celtics that season, which fortuitously led to the beginning of an acting career:

I’m positive my greatest value to the Celtics was as an after-dinner speaker. It seems to me I did more public speaking for the team than playing that first season. They sent me all over New England on speaking engagements. I’d pick up $25 or $50 an appearance, whatever the traffic would bear. When I wasn’t apologizing [for the few wins the team had], I was doing things like “Casey at the Bat” and “Face on the Bar Room Floor.” I did “Casey” at the Boston Baseball Writers Dinner that first winter, and Ted Williams was there too after winning the 1946 American League MVP Award. Ted was very kind to me and laughed his head off at my rendition. Afterward, he said to me, “Kid, I don’t know what kind of basketball player you are, but you ought to give it up and be an actor.” So doing those after-dinner speeches was my raison d’etre.12

Where Connors did establish his renown with the Boston Celtics on the basketball court was in a pregame warm-up on November 5, 1946, when he became the first player in NBA history to shatter a glass backboard. Contrary to the legend that developed, Connors did not shatter the backboard while attempting to dunk the basketball. “During the warm-ups, I took a set shot, a harmless set shot, and crash, the glass backboard shattered,” Connors recalled. The newfangled backboard was missing a key part, a piece of rubber between the glass and the rim, which caused the glass to shatter when the shot caromed off the rim. Because the Celtics game was being played at the Boston Arena, not at the Boston Garden, where Gene Autry‘s rodeo was playing to a large crowd, the Celtics management had to scramble to locate a replacement in order to play the game. Publicist Howie McHugh was dispatched to the Boston Garden to get a replacement backboard. “Howie tells how the Garden’s backboards were stored behind the Brahma bull pens, and nobody was fool enough to challenge the bulls for them,” Connors recalled. “Howie found two drunken cowboys and slipped them a couple of bucks to go into the pen, dodge the bulls, and get a glass backboard out. If he hadn’t, we might still be waiting at the Arena.”13

Connors is considered one of an elite group of fewer than a dozen athletes that played in both major-league baseball and the NBA, which includes Danny Ainge, Gene Conley, Dave DeBusschere, and Dick Groat. However, defining professional basketball as only teams in the NBA, or its forerunner the BAA, excludes many baseball players that played pro basketball in other leagues. According to Ted Brock’s research in Total Basketball, another dozen major-league ballplayers logged minutes with NBL teams, including Lou Boudreau, George Crowe, Irv Noren, and Del Rice.14

Connors left the Celtics in late February 1947 to go to spring training with the Brooklyn Dodgers. For the 1947 baseball season, the Dodgers sent Connors to their farm club in Mobile, Alabama, in the Class-AA Southern Association. He compiled a .255 batting average, belted 15 home runs, and drove in 82 runs to help Mobile win the Southern Association playoffs. Connors continued his ascent up the Dodgers’ minor-league chain, where the first base situation at the parent club was in a state of flux. For the 1947 season, Jackie Robinson played first base, which was not his natural position, just to get his bat into the lineup. Eddie Stevens, a regular first baseman for the Dodgers during the 1946 season, was shipped out to Montreal, Brooklyn’s top farm team. Howie Schultz, who split time with Stevens at first base in 1946 (and was another dual baseball-basketball athlete), was sold to the Philadelphia Phillies. Stevens was sold to the Pittsburgh Pirates after the 1947 season, clearing the way for Connors to at least play for Montreal in 1948 if not make the Brooklyn squad.

Connors, now a shrewd negotiator, played hard-to-get with the Boston Celtics to sign for the 1947-48 BAA season by claiming he had a deal to be player-coach of a Birmingham team in the new Southern Basketball League. While the Celtics eventually caved in to his contract demands, Connors played only four games for the Celtics before the team put him on waivers in November 1947 to save money, when they had acquired another center, Ed Sadowski. Connors always claimed he left basketball to concentrate on baseball. “Well, baseball and basketball didn’t mix. Definitely not,” Connors said. “I had to leave the Celtics in late February for spring training and figured I was in great shape because I had been running on the boards all winter. But because of that I found my legs actually were much tougher to get into condition. I think my baseball legs were bothered very much by basketball.”15

For the 1948 baseball season, the Dodgers assigned Connors to their top farm club in Montreal, where he hit a solid .307 with 17 home runs and 88 RBIs. Montreal won the International League playoffs and also the Little World Series, defeating St. Paul of the American Association. Back in Brooklyn, first base was still a merry-go-round until Gil Hodges became the regular first baseman midway through the 1948 season. Connors had a distinct shot at getting the first base job with Brooklyn in 1949, since Hodges hit just .249 in 1948. Connors did two things following the 1948 season to increase the odds of his promotion to Brooklyn. First, the 27-year-old bachelor settled down by marrying Elizabeth Riddell. Second, he finally abandoned his winter job as pro basketball player and played winter-league baseball with the Almendares ball club of the Cuban League.

Connors had a commanding presence, at 6-foot-6 and 200 pounds, with steely blue eyes and a loud voice. Yet he had a playful nature inside, although he wasn’t a clown as many portrayed him. He had an inquisitive mind and a drive to succeed, a desire for achievement, whether in sports or the performing arts. Unfortunately, by 1949, Connors had acquired a bigger reputation as a comedian than as a ballplayer. He was the hit of the Dodgers Follies at the Vero Beach, Florida, spring training camp in March 1949.16 He even got his picture in The Sporting News reciting “Casey at the Bat.”17 One writer remarked that “Kevin (Chuck) Connors, latest entry in Brooklyn’s first base derby, is a ballplayer by occupation, a dramatic actor by instinct and a screwball by popular demand.”18 Connors even handed out calling cards that advertised his availability for “Recitations, After-Dinner Speaker, Home Recordings for any Occasion, Free Lance Writing.”19 In his book Tales from the Dodger Dugout, Carl Erskine tells a great story about how Connors entertained his Dodger teammates:

Chuck Connors used to do card tricks in the big lobby. One trick he did required the help of an accomplice. Chuck would send Toby Atwell down the road to a phone booth. Toby would sit in the booth with a flashlight and read a paperback Western and wait. In the lobby, Connors would entice a few bets that he could have someone draw a card from the deck and then call the Swami, who would identify the card. The ten of hearts is drawn; everybody in the room sees it. Connors then dials the number of the phone booth. Toby answers on the first ring and immediately begins to name the suits, “spades, hearts …” Connors interrupts when he hears “hearts” by saying “Hello, Swami.” Toby then rapidly names the cards, “king, queen, jack, ten …” Connors again interrupts on the “ten” and hands the phone to one of the bettors. In a monotone, Toby says, “This is the Swami. Your card is the ten of hearts,” and hangs up. Connors picks up the money.20

After making a good impression with his bat rather than his mouth with the Dodgers’ B squad during spring training in 1949, Connors got a shot at the Brooklyn first base job when he was elevated to the A squad for the April 7 exhibition game in Macon, Georgia. When Connors went 1-for-5 in that game, manager Burt Shotton penciled him into the lineup for the April 8 game in Atlanta. However, in a pregame fielding drill, Connors was hit in the mouth by a ball thrown by Bruce Edwards and was taken to a local hospital. He needed five stitches to close the wound, which swelled his upper lip to twice its size. That bad break cost Connors his major-league opportunity. After missing two exhibition games, he returned for the April 10 game, but went 0-for-3. His bad breaks continued when the next three games were rained out. In the April 14 game in Washington, D.C., Connors went 0-for-4. Worse, he had the crowd in stitches. “The fans laughed themselves silly over the performance of this bush league first baseman who seemed to be doing a takeoff on the old college try,” one writer wrote. “Later Chuck said he hadn’t tried to be funny, that he’d been hustling for keeps hoping to make an impression on Shotton.”21

Shotton wasn’t amused. For the three-game city series with the New York Yankees, he inserted Gil Hodges back into the lineup at first base. Hodges proceeded to win the first base job and was in the opening day lineup at Ebbets Field on April 19. However, the day before, the Dodgers announced that they had acquired Connors from their Montreal farm club to back up Hodges. “The Mighty Kevin recited his version of ‘Casey at the Bat’ last night with new gusto at the Knothole Club dinner,” the Brooklyn Eagle commented, “but he has no intention of playing Casey on the ball field.” The Eagle added, though, that “Connors doubtless will wear out the seat of his breeches squirming around on the bench.”22

Although Connors had made the Brooklyn team, Shotton kept him on the bench as Hodges played every day at first base. It wasn’t until May 1 that Connors got an opportunity to play. With the Dodgers losing 4–2 to the Phillies in the bottom of the ninth inning, Shotton had Connors pinch-hit for Carl Furillo with one out and a runner on first base. Connors, the potential tying run, faced Russ Meyer, who was pitching for the Phillies. “I knew I was going to get a hit and win the game. I mean I was squeezing the bat so hard that sawdust started running down the handle,” Connors recalled his big moment on the major-league stage. “On the next pitch Meyer threw me a belt-high fastball on the outside corner, I creamed it! I hit a one hop back to the mound and he turned it into a double play. I still see that pitch in my dreams. It’s as big as a zeppelin. If I had waited on it a little longer, I might still be playing.”23 After the game when Shotton was asked why he used Connors as a pinch-hitter, he responded, with a sigh, “To reduce the possibilities of a double play.”24

That was the extent of Connors’ career with the Brooklyn Dodgers: two pitches, one swing, and 0-for-1 in the box score. Connors actually got one more opportunity in a Brooklyn uniform. On May 2, in an exhibition game at West Point against the Army varsity baseball team, Connors played first base and went 2-for-5 at the plate. However, his performance in the exhibition game didn’t matter. He was soon ticketed back to Montreal for the remainder of the 1949 season, where he batted a hefty .319 with 20 home runs and 108 RBIs to lead Montreal to the International League pennant. Back in Brooklyn, Hodges had a 19-game hitting streak in May to solidify his hold on first base, as the Dodgers marched to the 1949 National League pennant.

He played one more year at Montreal in 1950, a solid but unspectacular season in which he compiled a .290 batting average but with just six homers and 68 RBIs. Connors knew he was going nowhere in the Brooklyn organization with Hodges now a fixture at first base, so he lobbied Dodgers president Branch Rickey to trade him. On October 10, 1950, Brooklyn announced that Connors had been traded to the Chicago Cubs along with Dee Fondy, another first baseman who had played with Fort Worth of the Texas League in 1950, for Hank Edwards and cash. When Chicago manager Frank Frisch installed Fondy as his first baseman during spring training in 1951, Connors was assigned to the Cubs top farm club, the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League. Not making the Chicago Cubs turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Connors. “Now who goes to the games in LA? Producers, directors, writers, casting directors,” Connors recalled. “I became a kind of favorite of the show business people, unbeknownst to myself.”25

In Los Angeles, Connors thrived playing for the Angels. During the first half of the 1951 season, he compiled a .321 batting average in 98 games, with 22 home runs and 77 RBIs. By early July, Connors got the call to join the Chicago Cubs, switching places with Fondy, who was farmed out to the Angels. Connors was unspectacular in his half-season with the Cubs, though, hitting a weak .239 in 66 games with just two homers and 18 RBIs. He played fairly well for Frisch. But when Frisch was fired and replaced by Phil Cavaretta, a player-manager who was also a first baseman, Connors’s stock plummeted with the Cubs. Chicago finished in last place for the 1951 season and returned Connors to the Los Angeles Angels right after the season ended. Fondy became the Cubs’ regular first baseman for the next five years.

In September 1951, Connors received a phone call that changed his life. Bill Grady, the casting director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was a passionate fan of the Los Angeles Angels and asked Connors to test for a small role in the movie Pat and Mike, a film starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Connors got the five-minute part as the police captain and was paid $500 for just a few hours of work. Connors had found his post-baseball career. “I said right then, this is my racket,” Connors remembered. “Playing with Tracy and Hepburn, I was in the big leagues much faster than I arrived there in baseball.”26

Connors felt so strongly about his potential as an actor that in November 1951 he filed for an exemption to the major-league draft. “I’m more than satisfied to stay put in Los Angeles,” Connors said at the time. “The Coast League is one of the best leagues in baseball and the living and playing conditions are superior.”27 While this was a legitimate move for Connors to secure his future, it all but sealed his fate as a minor-league baseball player who would never return to the major leagues.

He played the 1952 season with the Los Angeles Angels, where he is best remembered for his showboating than his playing ability. For example, after hitting one home run, he slid into second base, cart wheeled to third base, then crawled to home plate. These antics added to his “screwball” reputation, where at various times in his minor-league career he threw raw hamburger to rowdy fans at a road game and taunted umpires with Shakespearean quotes. Connors had his mind on his future in acting: “When you’re playing professional sports, you’re in show business, too. You’re out there to please the crowd and a little showmanship doesn’t hurt.”28

After the 1952 baseball season concluded, Connors had roles in several more movies, including Trouble Along the Way and South Sea Woman. “I made $12,000 that offseason,” Connors avidly remembered about being a budding movie actor and his baseball salary being less than half that amount, “so I never reported to the Chicago Cubs for 1953.”29 In February 1953, Connors retired from baseball to focus on acting, which he felt was the “proper step” for his family in light of his belief that his baseball career had “reached the twilight stage.”30

While he had a reputation as a “zany” ballplayer, Connors was no buffoon as an actor. He asked questions and picked people’s brains to learn the show business. He took horseback riding lessons and learned to shoot a gun, to do his own stunts without need for a stuntman. He became renowned as a sharp businessman in the entertainment industry. “The day I left baseball, I became smart,” Connors said. “When I was in baseball, I played for the love of the game. I’d sign any contract they gave me. But then I stopped playing and began doing interviews with the players at the ball park. I began to see the light.”31 Of course, Connors had observed one of the masters of baseball negotiation, Branch Rickey. Connors was famous for remarking: “It was easy to figure out Mr. Rickey’s thinking about contracts. He had players and money—and just didn’t like to see the two of them mix.”32

His work blending external toughness with internal soft-heartedness in the movie Old Yeller led to his landing the role of Lucas McCain in the television series The Rifleman. The TV series ran for five years, from 1958 to 1963, and was very lucrative for Connors, who negotiated to receive a share of the show’s profits. McCain was a single father who lived on a ranch in North Fork, New Mexico, in the late 1870s. He raised his son Mark (played by Johnny Crawford) with moral lessons, not brute force, while protecting the area from the dangers of the Wild West with his Winchester rifle. The tender relationship between father and son in a violent world was the successful formula of The Rifleman.

“Lucas was a righteous character, despite the violence,” Connors explained. “We had the benefit of the father-son relationship, so I could have a little scene at the end of the show where I would explain to Mark, essentially, that sometimes violence is necessary, but it isn’t good.” When Mark would often say that Lucas had “won,” Connors would disabuse him of that attitude. “Wait a minute, son,” he would say. “You never win when you kill someone. It demeans you. It takes something away. People have got to learn to do away with violence and guns, and to love each other.”33 Connors had great admiration for that role: “I have a lot of pride in The Rifleman, because it was a great part, to play a good father, a strong man who believes in right and wrong.”34

Westerns were hot in television in the late 1950s. In March 1959, eight of the top ten TV shows were westerns, including The Rifleman ranked at number six. Connors was associated with a group of elite star actors such as James Arness (Gunsmoke), Hugh O’Brian (Wyatt Earp), James Garner (Maverick), and Richard Boone (Have Gun, Will Travel). Baseball skills came in handy to get the part as Lucas McCain, as Time magazine noted: “When he walked in to try out for Rifleman, the director suddenly pitched a rifle at him. Chuck fielded it neatly, got the job.”35

Ironically, as Connors became a star actor in Los Angeles during the late 1950s, the Dodgers relocated from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Connors was often seen as a spectator at Dodger Stadium during the 1960s, talking to the likes of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. Connors was even an intermediary in their contract talks following the 1965 baseball season, a negotiation that author Jeff Katz called a “significant convergence of baseball and show business” since the two pitchers staged a holdout using a movie contract as leverage.36 Connors convinced Koufax and Drysdale to end their movie dreams and Dodgers management to offer each pitcher a contract worth more than $100,000 a season, then the benchmark salary for baseball’s most exceptional ballplayers.

During the 1950s, Connors and his wife Elizabeth raised their four sons Michael, Jeffrey, Stephen, and Kevin in a house in Woodland Hills, California. He later moved to a ranch in Tehachapi, California, about two and a half hours north of Los Angeles. Following his divorce from Elizabeth, Connors married Kamala Devi in 1963, whom he met on the set of the movie Geronimo, where Connors portrayed the famous Apache warrior. After they later divorced, Connors married Faith Quabius in 1977, but this third marriage lasted just a few years. When asked about the possibility of marrying a fourth time, Connors often evoked an age-old baseball quip, “No, three strikes and you’re out.”37

The Rifleman lasted five seasons, but by the end of the 1962–63 season the TV western had run its course as popular shows among viewers. After starring in three more short-lived TV series (Arrest and Trial, Branded, and Cowboy in Africa), Connors returned to movies in the late 1960s with roles in spaghetti westerns, a genre made famous by Clint Eastwood with action-packed western thrillers. Connors appeared in several spaghetti westerns, including The Proud and Damned and Kill Them All and Come Back Alone.

After he turned age 50 in 1971, Connors was rarely cast as a leading man, so he gravitated to villain roles that he had successfully played back in the 1950s. “Chuck would be a tremendous villain the rest of his career,” biographer Fury wrote, “because a man who was six and a half feet tall and capable of sheer menace in his eyes and demeanor, was truly a formidable and fearsome sight.”38 Christopher Sharrett, the author of the book The Rifleman, wrote: “Connors intended to parlay his threatening physique and face—with its ever-lengthening, lantern jaw—into recognition as the ‘new Boris Karloff,’ a status that never truly materialized.”39 Connors did attain modest acclaim as a screen villain in The Mad Bomber, Soylent Green, and Tourist Trap.

Connors was active in Republican politics in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a strong supporter of fellow Californian Richard Nixon, who was elected President in 1968, and fellow-actor Ronald Reagan, who was elected governor of California in 1966 and later was elected President in 1980. Connors had a celebrated meeting with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1973, after meeting him at a party at Nixon’s Western White House in San Clemente, California. “Spotting Mr. Connors in a denim shirt at the helicopter pad, Mr. Brezhnev rushed over and threw his arms around the tall rugged star, who hugged back and lifted the laughing Communist party leader off his feet,” the New York Times reported.40 The Connors/Brezhnev bear hug was captured by photographers and ran in many newspapers across the nation.

In 1977 Connors played slave-owner Tom Moore in Roots, a television mini-series that helped to raise the consciousness of America about the impact of slavery and racism. This villain role was the most challenging of his career, because the despicable Moore was so evil and racist. As biographer Fury wrote: “Connors was so convincing in his portrayal that he received hate mail for his fictional acts in the story, including Moore’s rape of Kizzy, the young black woman portrayed by Leslie Uggams.”41 Following his critically acclaimed performance in Roots, Connors continued acting for another 15 years, with his most prominent films being Airplane II and Salmonberries.

In July 1984, he received a star on Hollywood Boulevard’s celebrated Walk of Fame. Following the ceremony, the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted a party at Dodger Stadium to honor Connors, which Connors felt “was a bigger thrill than getting the star,” given that he had just one lone at-bat during his brief baseball career with the Brooklyn Dodgers 35 years earlier.42

Connors died in Los Angeles, California, on November 10, 1992. He is buried in San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, California, where his gravestone is adorned by a photo of him as The Rifleman along with the logos of the Dodgers and Cubs baseball teams and the Celtics basketball team.

Despite his fame as an actor, Connors remembered his humble Brooklyn upbringing and remained grounded as a person. “I couldn’t have all this as a ball player,” he mused in a 1966 interview as he gazed at the view of the San Fernando Valley from his home. “But maybe baseball is a purer, healthier way for a guy to make a living.”43 He also maintained his sense of humor. While he always contended that he’d rather have been Gil Hodges than The Rifleman, Connors kept his feelings about that light-hearted. In the late 1950s when an interviewer said to him that “but for Gil Hodges, you might be playing for the Dodgers,” Connors interrupted him by joking, “Shhhh! He’d be the Rifleman!”44

An updated version of this biography appeared in “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors“ (SABR, 2018), edited by Rob Edelman and Bill Nowlin.

Notes

1 “Chuck Connors Swaps Glove for Greasepaint, Acting Career,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1953: C1.

2 Roscoe McGowen, “Connors, Disappointed Dodger, Proves He Can Play—In Films,” The Sporting News, December 15, 1954: 22.

3 Cynthia Wilbur, “Chuck Connors,” For the Love of the Game: Baseball Memories from the Men Who Were There (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1992), 48.

4 John Ross, “Kevin Connors Flock Farmhand,” Brooklyn Eagle, June 18, 1940: 14.

5 David Fury, “Chuck Connors: The Man Behind the Rifle (Minneapolis: Artist’s Press, 1997), 36.

6 “Kevin Connors, College Star, Joins Fraser Club,” Lynn Evening Item, June 6, 1942.

7 Fury, Chuck Connors, 20.

8 George Sullivan, “Kevin (Chuck) Connors,” The Picture History of the Boston Celtics (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982), 154–155.

9 “Lions, Bushwicks, Gamble Win Skeins in Game Tonight,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 25, 1945: 15.

10 Harold Burr, “Revival of Vaudeville in Chuck Connors’ Hands,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 27, 1949: 31.

11 Mordaunt Hall, “Wallace Beery as Chuck Connors and George Raft as Steve Brodie in a New Film, ‘The Bowery,’” New York Times, October 5, 1933: 24.

12 Sullivan, History of the Boston Celtics, 152–153.

13 Sullivan, History of the Boston Celtics, 153.

14 Ted Brock, “Multi-Sport Stars: Men for Two (or Three) Seasons,” Total Basketball: The Ultimate Basketball Encyclopedia (Toronto: Sport Media Publishing, 2003), 339.

15 Sullivan, History of the Boston Celtics, 154.

16 “Dodgers Move from Diamond to Stage in Vero Beach Verities,” The Sporting News, March 30, 1949: 22.

17 Tom Meany, “Connors Wins Laughs … Now Aims for Cheers,” The Sporting News, May 4, 1949: 5.

18 United Press, “Bums’ Rookie Connors Is Actor, Orator,” Hartford Courant, April 12, 1949: 16.

19 Bill Roeder, “Mr. Connors a Funny Man—By His Own Admission,” The Sporting News, October 25, 1950: 2.

20 Carl Erskine, Tales from the Dodger Dugout (New York: Sports Publishing, 2003), 209.

21 Roeder, “Mr. Connors a Funny Man.”

22 Harold Burr, “Dodgers Take on Connors for First Base Insurance,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 19, 1949: 17.

23 Fury, Chuck Connors, 48.

24 Tommy Holmes, “Dodgers, Below .500 Mark, Off to Disappointing Start in Race,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 2, 1949: 13.

25 Wilbur, For the Love of the Game, 51.

26 Bob Hunter, “Connors Chucked Bat for TV Riches,” The Sporting News, October 8, 1966: 32.

27 Associated Press, “Connors, Angels’ First Baseman, First Player to Oppose Draft,” New York Times, November 19, 1951: 41.

28 Sullivan, History of the Boston Celtics, 154.

29 Lynn Parrott, “The Chuck Connors Story—Ham to Star,” The Sporting News, January 9, 1959: 3.

30 “Chuck Connors Swaps Glove for Greasepaint, Acting Career.”

31 Murray Schumach, “Rifleman, Lawman,” New York Times, September 15, 1963: 143.

32 Joe Garagiola, Baseball Is a Funny Game (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960), 148.

33 Fury, Chuck Connors, 136.

34 Fury, Chuck Connors, 294.

35 “The Six-Gun Galahad,” Time, March 30, 1959: 60.

36 Jeff Katz, “Everybody’s a Star: The Dodgers Go Hollywood,” The National Pastime, 2011: 75.

37 Fury, Chuck Connors, 311.

38 Fury, Chuck Connors, 206.

39 Christopher Sharrett, The Rifleman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 99.

40 John Herbers, “Brezhnev Leaves West on a Note of Informality,” New York Times, June 25, 1973: 1A.

41 Fury, Chuck Connors, 231.

42 Fury, Chuck Connors, 253.

43 Hunter, “Connors Chucked Bat for TV Riches.”

44 Tony Salin, “Now Batting for Furillo, the Rifleman,” Baseball’s Forgotten Heroes: One Fan’s Search for the Game’s Most Interesting Overlooked Players (Chicago: Masters Press, 1999), 16.

At every point along the way, there seemed to be just a few things burning brighter in Ron Darling’s vicinity, something that stole some of the spotlight. Perhaps in ’86 (and after) it was all the attention paid to the other members of that famous (or sometimes infamous) team. Or that though he started the seventh game in the ’86 World Series, more people remember the Bill Buckner blunder in Game Six. Or that the longest college no-hitter actually ended up in a loss for the Yale Bulldogs, Darling’s team. Or perhaps it is just that there is little in the way of “negative press” that might have made even bigger headlines.

In total though, it all adds up to the solid, successful multifaceted career of someone who left a positive mark wherever he went. His life before and after baseball has had highs and lows but his achievement continued with a level of consistency most pitchers would love when standing on the mound. The best introduction might just be, “This is Ron Darling. Have a chat with him. He’s smart, accomplished, and has some great stories to tell.”

Ronald Maurice Darling Jr. was born on August 19, 1960, in Honolulu but grew up in Red Sox country — Millbury, Massachusetts. His mother was Hawaiian-Chinese, while his father was French Canadian, leading Darling to be fluent in Chinese and French as well as his native English.1 When asked what the best 10 years of his life were, he said, “Right now I think from 10 to 20 were my favorite years. I had an idyllic family life, great parents, three younger brothers who adored me, thought I was the cat’s meow. Went to an amazing high school. Went to Yale between those years. Played in the Cape Cod League, which was the last time I had fun. Now we use that term loosely. The last time I had fun playing the sport, you know, because it was before I was a professional. Yeah, 10 to 20 was amazing, because it got real serious after that.”2

While Darling called his stretch in the Cape Cod League the last time he had fun in baseball, the league is serious business for major-league prospects. Part of the fun may have been due to the many roles he got to play. His major-league career as a starting pitcher overshadows the versatility he displayed throughout his years in the Cape Cod League. As an example, in the league’s all-star game at Yankee Stadium, he played left field but jumped in to pitch and retire the final two batters in a one-run game. It is also worth mentioning that he came close to hitting for the cycle in this game, missing only a triple.3 In 2002 Darling was inducted into the Cape Cod Baseball League Hall of Fame along with 11 others, including Nomar Garciaparra, Jason Varitek, and Buck Showalter. At the time, he was considered “one of the best-all around players in Cape league history.” His league statistics include a .336 batting average, six home runs, and a 4-3 pitching record.4

Darling attended Yale University from 1979 to 1981, leaving after his junior year for professional baseball. He majored in French and Southeast Asian history. Upon entering Yale, his plan was to play both football and baseball. Once there, though, he focused on baseball, not for lack of love of the sport. A Yale sports department publication quoted him as saying, “If there were five or six regrets in my life, one is that I didn’t continue to play football at Yale. I would’ve loved to play for Carm [referring to legendary Yale football coach Carmen Cozza].”5

At Yale Darling was a strong hitter (usually hitting second or third in the lineup) and a top pitcher. He was the Yale pitcher on the mound for an NCAA regional tournament game against St. John’s in 1981, called by some the “greatest college baseball game ever played.” Darling was up against opposing pitcher Frank Viola, who later became a fellow Met and a very good friend. For 12 innings the two teams fought until St. John’s eked out a 1-0 victory. In a powerful display of pitching prowess, Darling pitched a no-hitter for 11 of those innings and struck out 16. The game ended on a double steal by St. John’s.6 

In 1981, after his junior year at Yale, Darling was drafted by the Texas Rangers in the first round of the amateur draft. That year he pitched for the Rangers’ Double-A affiliate, the Tulsa Drillers of the Texas League, where he ended with a 4-2 record as a starting pitcher. Before the 1982 season he was traded to the Mets along with pitcher Walt Terrell for infielder-outfielder Lee Mazzilli, and pitched in 1982 and ’83 for the Tidewater Tides. Called up to the Mets in September 1983, he made his major league debut on September 6, starting and losing to the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-0. Darling gave up one run in 6⅓ innings with six strikeouts and one walk. He started five games for the Mets in September, ending up with a 1-3 record and a 2.80 ERA.

In 1984 Darling won a spot in the starting rotation, but had a mediocre start to the season. In April and May he had a 3-3 record and a 4.61 ERA. But in June and July he won seven straight and finished the season 12-9 and with a 3.81 ERA. He finished fifth in the voting for the Rookie of the Year Award; teammate Dwight Gooden was the winner.

In 1985 Darling shaved almost a run off his earned-run average (2.90) and had a 16-6 record despite giving up a league-leading 114 walks. He was the number-two starter behind Gooden and made the All-Star team that year. He made his first major-league relief appearance in a celebrated 19-inning game against the Atlanta Braves, which the Mets won 16-13. Although the Mets (98-64) did not make the postseason, the strong season and Darling’s continuing improvement left them positioned well for the future.

The next year the Mets won the World Series over the Boston Red Sox with Darling as a key contributor. After posting a 15-6 record and a 2.81 ERA, he started World Series Games One, Four, and Seven, losing Game One, winning Game Four, and getting a no-decision in Game Seven. He posted a 1.53 ERA.

The years after the 1986 World Series were tough ones for the Mets and for Darling, described as “the dynasty that never happened.” While the team remained competitive for a few more years, the decline was clear. Darling continued to pitch solidly in 1987 with a 12-8 record but a 4.29 ERA. His highest career win total came in 1988 when he recorded a 17-9 record with a 3.25 ERA in 240 innings, another career high. Darling followed up in 1989 with a .500 record (14-14) and 3.52 ERA.

The 1990 season saw the Mets in transition, coming off a lackluster 1989 and management uncertainty. Darling found himself split between starting and a new role as a relief pitcher. The bullpen did not serve him well, and 1990 went down as Darling’s first losing season (7-9) with a bloated 4.50 ERA.

In 1991 Darling was again a starting pitcher; in fact, he started games for three teams. On July 15 he was traded along with pitcher Mike Thomas to the Montreal Expos for pitcher Tim Burke. Two weeks later, at the trading deadline, the Expos sent him to the Oakland Athletics for minor-league pitchers Matt Grott and Russ Cormier. With all the moving, Darling was 5-8 in the NL and 3-7 in the American league.

Darling had some success as a starter in Oakland, particularly in 1992, going 15-10. With his best stuff behind him, he made the adjustments that all major-league pitchers with long careers need to make. The A’s led the AL West Division that season. (Darling lost his only start in the ALCS as the Athletics fell to Toronto.)

Darling found the A’s welcoming and family-friendly.7 The good times in Oakland may have just added to the somewhat disheartening way that his playing career ended. On August 19, 1995, which also happened to be his 35th birthday, he was released; he chose to be released rather than be placed on the disabled list, which would have allowed him to remain with the team for the rest of the season. (He later admitted that he wasn’t prepared for the ending when it finally came, still believing he could fight his way back to a semblance of his prior performance. However that was not to be.8)

Darling won 136 major-league games and lost 116. His career ERA was 3.87. His performance on the mound could never be called flawless. There were times when he struggled with control (leading the National League in walks in 1985 was an example) but his “stuff” could be counted on to keep enough batters from putting together enough hits that runs would generally still be hard to come by. He also contributed through effective fielding, which earned him a Gold Glove in 1989. Darling was always a game-smart pitcher who was always ready to take the ball, and said he as proud of having a career that never included a trip to the disabled list.

For Darling, the 1986 Mets season and World Series win were important moments, but were just one stop in his multifaceted career of highs, lows, and reinvention. “I’m not always great at things, but I’m smart,” he told the New York Daily News.9

His post-baseball life has been active and never too far from the sport. He moved into broadcasting and was involved with various sportscasts and shows for several years. In 2005 Darling was the color commentator for the first Washington Nationals season. In 2006 he joined Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez in the broadcast booth for Mets games on the SNY network, and has won an Emmy award. As of 2015 he continued in the role of commentator/analyst.

In between the baseball, there was family, philanthropy, and writing a book. Darling and Antoinette Reilly, a model, were married in January 1986. They had two sons, Jordan and Tyler. They later divorced and in 2004 Darling married Joanna Last, a TV makeup artist.

In 2009 he founded the Ron Darling Foundation to help fund diabetes research (which his son Jordan contracted as an 11-year-old). The foundation later expanded its work to include collaborating with and donating to several organizations including Habitat for Humanity, the NYPD Foundation and Hurricane Sandy Relief.10

In 2009 Darling published a book, The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball and the Art of Pitching, in which he gave a detailed view of what is going on inside the head of a major-league pitcher — inning by inning, pitch by pitch. He combined moments from his own games with the Mets and the Athletics as well as key innings he witnessed as a broadcaster.

With his current days full as a New York Mets broadcaster, active philanthropist, father, and husband it seems his spectacular baseball career is certainly not Ron Darling’s whole story, but just an important chapter among many.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the following:

Darling, Ron.  The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball and the Art of Pitching (New York: Random House, 2009).

newyork.mets.mlb.com/team/broadcasters.jsp?c_id=nym.

“The Web of the Game,” The New Yorker, July 20, 1981.

All stats come from:  baseball-reference.com.

Notes

1 diabetesresearch.org/Ron-Darling-bio.

2  blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2010/06/ron_darling_on.php?page=2.

3  capecodbaseball.org/about/welcome/#sthash.DPgtxjXY.dpuf.

4 capecodbaseball.org/news/league/?article_id=241.

5 yalebulldogs.com/sports/m-basebl/2014-15/releases/20150227l81ndr).

6 nytimes.com/2012/06/09/sports/baseball/darling-viola-pitchers-duel-lives-on-in-st-johns-baseball-lore.html?_r=1.

7 nytimes.com/1992/10/10/sports/sports-of-the-times-darling-s-chess-comeback.html).

8 deadspin.com/5912078/how-a-career-ends-ron-darling-celebrated-his-35th-birthday-by-getting-cut-and-being-left-alone-at-home.

9 nydailynews.com/blogs/bitterbill/ron-darling-talks-mets-sny-blog-entry-1.2168993.

10 rondarlingfoundation.org/.

Joe DiMaggio was one of the most recognizable and popular men in mid-twentieth century America. He was celebrated in song and literature as an iconic hero, and he was married, briefly, to the nation’s number one glamour girl. On March 16, 1999, the House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring him “for his storied baseball career; for his many contributions to the nation throughout his lifetime; and for transcending baseball and becoming a symbol for the ages of talent, commitment and achievement.”1

But first and foremost Joe DiMaggio was a ballplayer. Known as the Yankee Clipper, he was the undisputed leader of New York Yankees teams that won nine World Series titles in his 13-year career that ran from 1936 to 1951, with three years lost to duty in World War II. He was three times the American League’s Most Valuable Player and he holds what many consider to be the most remarkable baseball record of all, a 56-game hitting streak in 1941. As the son of immigrants, he was the embodiment of the American Dream, a rags-to-riches story played out in pinstripes.

Joseph Paul DiMaggio was born Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio on November 25, 1914, in Martinez, California, 25 miles northeast of San Francisco. His parents, Giuseppe and Rosalia (Mercurio) DiMaggio, had settled there after emigrating from Sicily. After Joe was born they moved the family to San Francisco, where Giuseppe continued to work as a fisherman. Joe was the eighth of their nine children, one of five sons. Two of his brothers, Vince and Dominic, would also play in the major leagues.

Unlike two of his older brothers, Joe had no interest in joining his father on the fishing boat. Instead, he played for several amateur and semi-pro teams in baseball-rich San Francisco. It was 19-year-old Vince, who was then playing for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, who got Joe into professional ball. When the Seals found themselves in need of a shortstop near the end of the 1932 season, Vince convinced Seals manager Ike Caveney to give his 17-year-old brother a chance. Joe played in the final three games of the season, and then was signed to a contract in 1933 for $225 a month.

Moved to the outfield because of his erratic arm, DiMaggio hit .340 and set a PCL record by hitting in 61 straight games. In 1934, he hit .341, but a knee injury that sidelined him in August made major-league teams leery of signing him. The Yankees offered to buy his contract for $25,000 and five players, but with the contingency that he remain with the Seals in 1935 to prove he was healthy. DiMaggio made a convincing case by hitting .398, with 34 homers and 154 runs batted in.

In 1936, only two years after the departure of Babe Ruth, the heralded rookie came to spring training facing big expectations. Writing in The Sporting News on March 26, Dan Daniel noted, “Yankee fans regard him as the Moses who is to lead their club out of the second-place wilderness. . ..”2 It didn’t take long for the rookie to make his mark. Halfway through the season, when he was hitting around .350 and had started in right field in the All-Star Game, his photo was on the cover of Time magazine. For the year he hit .323 with 29 homers and drove in 125 runs.

DiMaggio was the classic five-tool player; in addition to hitting for average and power, he could run, throw, and field. Joe McCarthy, the Yankees manager from 1931 to 1946, called him the best base runner he ever saw. His all-around play led the 1936 Yankees to the first of four straight World Series titles. The 21-year-old sensation had established himself as the successor to Babe Ruth. After the Series, he received a hero’s welcome in his home town of San Francisco, where Mayor Angelo Rossi gave him the key to the city.

DiMaggio finished second in the MVP vote in 1937, despite leading the American League in home runs, slugging percentage, runs, and total bases. He won the first of his three MVP Awards in 1939, when he led the league with a career-best .381 average. Following that season, he married 21-year-old Dorothy Arnold, a singer, dancer, and actress he met while filming a bit part in the movie Manhattan Merry-Go-Round.

By then the 6-foot-2, 190-pound outfielder was acknowledged as the best player in baseball, but to some his ethnic background was still ripe for stereotypical portrayal. In a cover story in the May 1, 1939 issue of Life magazine, Noel Busch identified DiMaggio as a “tall, thin Italian youth equipped with slick black hair” and “squirrel teeth.” But the young ballplayer apparently confounded Busch’s general perception of Italian Americans. “Although he learned Italian first, Joe, now twenty-four, speaks English without an accent and is otherwise well adapted to most U.S. mores. Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti.”3

After winning a second consecutive batting title in 1940, DiMaggio reached a new level of fame in 1941. He set one of the most enduring records in sports by hitting in 56 consecutive games. On May 15, the day the streak began, the Yankees were in fourth place, and DiMaggio had batted a lowly .194 over the previous 20 games. On June 17, DiMaggio broke the Yankee hitting-streak record of 29 games, set by Roger Peckinpaugh in 1919 and equaled by Earle Combs in 1931.

As DiMaggio’s streak continued to grow it gradually became a national obsession. Day after day, across the country, the question was: “Did he get one today?” In its July 14 issue, Time magazine wrote: “Ever since it became apparent that the big Italian from San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf was approaching a record that had eluded Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and other great batsmen, Big Joe’s hits have been the biggest news in U.S. sport. Radio programs were interrupted for DiMaggio bulletins.”4

On June 29, in the seventh inning of the second game of a doubleheader in Washington, DiMaggio hit a single to pass George Sisler’s 41-game streak set in 1922, commonly referred to as the “modern record” to distinguish it from Wee Willie Keeler’s 44-game streak, the “all-time record” set in 1897. The New York Times reported on June 30 that the fans “roared thunderous acclaim” to “one of the greatest players baseball has ever known,” while his teammates ‘to a man,’ were as excited as schoolboys over the feat.”5 On July 2, DiMaggio broke Keeler’s record with a fifth-inning home run off Red Sox pitcher Dick Newsome.

Fifteen days later, on July 17, the streak ended in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium in front of 67,468 fans — at that time the largest crowd ever to see a night game — when Indians third baseman Ken Keltner robbed DiMaggio of hits with two spectacular plays. Over the course of the streak the Yankees moved from fourth place, 5 1/2 games back, to first, seven games ahead of Cleveland. DiMaggio went on to hit safely in his next 16 games, and the Yankees went on to win the pennant and then beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series.

One of the fascinating sidelights of the streak is that in his 223 times at bat, DiMaggio struck out only five times. In fact, he struck out only 13 times in the entire season. The late Harvard paleontologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould, noting the streak, called it “the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in American sports.”6

DiMaggio batted .357 for the 1941 season and led the league in runs batted in and total bases. He won his second MVP Award, receiving 15 first-place votes, while Ted Williams, who hit .406 and led the league in home runs, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, and runs, received eight.

DiMaggio batted just .305 in 1942, the lowest average of his seven years in the majors, and he also compiled the lowest number of home runs and runs batted in. The Yankees won the pennant, but they lost the World Series to the Cardinals, marking the team’s only loss in 10 trips to the Series during DiMaggio’s career.

On February 17, 1943, DiMaggio enlisted in the Army Air Force. Like many other major leaguers, he never saw combat, serving instead in a morale-boosting role by playing on service baseball squads. In June 1944 he was sent to Hawaii, where he continued to play ball but also spent several weeks in a Honolulu hospital suffering from stomach ulcers. After being sent back to the mainland, he was granted a medical discharge in September 1945. In the meantime, his wife had been granted a divorce and custody of their son, Joe, Jr.

DiMaggio’s first season following the war was a disappointment for the thirty-one-year-old returning veteran, dubbed “America’s No. 1 athletic hero” by the New York Daily News.7 While his slugging percentage was fourth- best in the AL, his batting average (.290) and RBIs (95) were lower than in any previous season, and his home run total (25) the second lowest. As the 1947 season neared, the outlook for improvement was not good. The first news about DiMaggio that year was the announcement of his upcoming surgery to remove a bone spur from his left heel. On January 7, a three-inch spur was removed. Then, when skin-graft surgery was needed two months later to close the wound from the first operation, John Drebinger of the New York Times wrote that DiMaggio “seems to be giving more prominence to the human heel than it has received since the days of Achilles.”8

The injury kept him out of the lineup until April 19, when he appeared as a pinch- hitter. He made his first start the next day, hitting a three-run homer in a 6–2 win over the Athletics, but by the end of April he was hitting a paltry .143. A 4-for-5 performance against the Red Sox on May 25 put him over the .300 mark for the first time. On May 26, before 74,747 fans, the Yankees won their fourth straight over Boston, and fifth straight overall. In the 9–3 win, DiMaggio went 3-for-4 and raised his average to .323. On June 3, in a 3–0 win over the first-place Detroit Tigers, DiMaggio got four hits to raise his average to a league-leading .368. He had hit safely in 16 straight games since May 18, hitting .493 over that stretch.

The Yankees moved into first place on June 15 with a doubleheader sweep of the St. Louis Browns. A 19-game winning streak, between June 29 and July 17, put them 11 1/2 games ahead of Detroit, and they finished the season with a 12-game lead over the Tigers.

By the end of the season, DiMaggio’s statistics were again below his pre-war levels. His average had fallen to .315, seventh best in the AL, with 20 home runs (his lowest total to date), and 97 RBIs, third in the league but his second lowest total. Although surpassed in virtually every offensive category by Ted Williams, who won his second Triple Crown, DiMaggio was awarded his third MVP Award on the basis of his all-around play in leading the Yankees to their first pennant since 1943. Receiving eight first-place votes compared to three for the Red Sox slugger, the Yankee Clipper edged his perennial rival by a single point, 202-201.

In the memorable World Series against the Dodgers, DiMaggio hit only .231, but he did hit two home runs, one of which gave the Yanks a 2–1 win in Game Five. In this Series, however, he is best remembered for his reaction to Al Gionfriddo’s spectacular catch in Game Six. In the sixth inning, the Yankees, trailing 8–5, put two men on with two out, bringing DiMaggio to the plate as the tying run. Gionfriddo, a seldom-used outfielder, had entered the game that inning as a defensive replacement. The Yankee slugger launched a long drive toward the visitors’ bullpen in deep left, but Gionfriddo was able to track it down and make a lunging catch just short of the bullpen before crashing into the waist-high gate near the 415-foot sign. No less memorable than the catch was DiMaggio’s reaction. In a rare display of emotion, the famously stoic star kicked at the dirt near second base when he saw that Gionfriddo had caught the ball.

Nineteen forty-eight proved to be DiMaggio’s last great season, at least in terms of statistics. Playing in 153 games, in spite of a bone spur in his right heel, he led the league in home runs, RBIs, and total bases, and finished second to Lou Boudreau in the MVP vote. The 1949 season proved to be one of the worst of his career; however, his heroic midseason return from injury helped cement his reputation as an inspirational team leader.

The lingering bone spur injury caused DiMaggio to miss the first 65 games of the ‘49 season. With the press speculating that the Yankee Clipper might be nearing the end of the road, a sullen DiMaggio isolated himself in his hotel room. Then, in mid-June, the pain suddenly disappeared. Two weeks later he made his debut in a crucial series against the Red Sox at Fenway. In the opener, on June 28, he drove in two runs and scored two in a 5–4 win. The next day he hit two homers and drove in four, then wrapped up his first regular-season series since the previous September with his fourth homer in three games and three RBIs. The sweep put the Yankees eight games ahead of the Red Sox.

Boston bounced back with a late-season surge that gave them a one-game lead over New York with two games at Yankee Stadium remaining. DiMaggio, meanwhile, had been hospitalized in September with pneumonia, but was in the starting lineup when the final series began.

The day of the opener, October 1, was also “Joe DiMaggio Day.” Before 69,551 fans, the Yankee Clipper, with his mother and brother Dom by his side, was lauded in several speeches and received what the New York Times described as “a small mountain of gifts.” At the conclusion of the hour-long ceremony, DiMaggio spoke to the crowd, ending his speech by saying, “I want to thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee.”9

DiMaggio, described as looking “wan and weak after his recent siege,” had told manager Casey Stengel that he hoped to play three innings.10 Instead, he played the entire game. With the Yankees trailing, 4–0, he doubled in the fourth and scored their first run in the 5–4 win that brought the two teams to a tie with one game left.

In the finale, Vic Raschi held the Sox scoreless through eight innings, but in the ninth two runs scored when DiMaggio’s tired legs weren’t able to catch up to a drive by Bobby Doerr that went for a triple. Drained of energy and realizing that he was a detriment to his team, DiMaggio ran in from center field, taking himself out of the game. The Yankees held on to win the game, 5–3, and the pennant. Limited to 76 games, he hit .346 with 67 RBIs. The Associated Press gave him its award for sports’ greatest comeback of 1949, with second place going to the Yankees, a team that had been plagued by injuries for much of the season.

DiMaggio was able to play in 139 games in 1950, hitting .301 with 32 home runs, 122 RBIs, and a league-leading .585 slugging percentage. But age and injury limited him to 116 games in 1951, when he hit only 12 homers and compiled the lowest average of his career at .263. On December 11, 1951, the 36-year-old veteran announced his retirement, saying, “If I can’t do it right, I don’t want to play any longer.”11

In the six years he played after the war, DiMaggio remained the leader of a Yankees team that won the World Series in each of his final three seasons. But while he won the MVP Award in 1947, and 1948 was one of his best seasons, overall his postwar performance was not at the same level as it had been before the war. “Baseball wasn’t much fun for Joe from 1949 until he quit,” said teammate Phil Rizzuto. “He was getting older and he was hurt a lot.”12 His post-war batting average was .304, with an average of 24 home runs per year, compared to .339 and 31 homers per year between 1936 and 1942.

In his career, DiMaggio, hit .325 with 361 home runs, 1,537 RBIs, and for a .579 slugging average. He was an All-Star in each of his 13 seasons and, in addition to winning three MVP Awards, he finished in the top nine seven other times. Perhaps more impressive than any other statistic is the fact that in 6,821 times at bat, he struck out 369 times — only eight more than his total number of home runs — for an average of once every 18.5 times at bat.

Given the relative brevity of his career, DiMaggio’s totals don’t measure up to those of many other major stars. But he was admired not only for what he did on the field but for how he looked doing it. Columnist Jim Murray wrote: “Joe DiMaggio played the game at least at a couple of levels higher than the rest of baseball. A lot of guys, all you had to see to know they were great was a stat sheet. DiMaggio, you had to see. It wasn’t only numbers on a page — although they were there too — it was a question of command, style, grace.”13

In the eyes of his contemporaries, Joe DiMaggio was universally considered the best player they had ever seen. Even his arch-rival, Ted Williams, said, “I have always felt I was a better hitter than Joe, but I have to say that he was the greatest baseball player of our time. He could do it all.”14 Stan Musial, the often overlooked third member of the great triad of the 1940s and 1950s, said: “There was never a day when I was as good as Joe DiMaggio at his best. Joe was the best, the very best I ever saw.”15 Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Red Smith called DiMaggio “indisputably the finest ballplayer of his time.”16

Rico Petrocelli, a New York native who played for the Red Sox between 1965 and 1976, recalled going to Yankee Stadium as a youngster: “We were in the bleachers, and Joe DiMaggio was still playing. I looked around and noticed nobody was watching the pitcher throw the ball. Everyone was looking at DiMaggio. When he’d catch a ball, he’d lope after it. It was just beautiful to watch. I’ll never forget it.”17

An unsigned column in the Washington Post on July 2, 1941, the day after DiMaggio surpassed George Sisler’s consecutive-game hit streak, placed the Yankee star alongside the other “Olympians” of baseball, such as Cobb, Ruth, and Speaker, and said of his style, “there is something about it, at bat and in the field, that suggests some of the great sculptures of the Italian Renaissance: Donatello’s, for example.”18

In the batter’s box, DiMaggio was the picture of understated calm. He stood there motionless, hands and head still, feet wide apart. Only at the last moment, when he whipped the bat around in his trademark long swing, did he unleash the force that he had kept under tight control.

DiMaggio was no less adept at keeping his emotions under tight control, at least in public. DiMaggio embodied sprezzatura, the Italian term for the ability to make the difficult look easy. Teammate Jerry Coleman called him “the only professional athlete I’ve ever seen who had an imperial presence.”19 But DiMaggio’s calm exterior masqueraded the inner turmoil that drove him to always be at his best. Whatever emotions he stuffed inside and hid from the paying customers manifest themselves in the ulcers that earned him a discharge from the service in 1945.

DiMaggio understood his role as a public figure and he did his best to live up to his image as the greatest player in the game and the leader of its best team. His grace and style on the field were matched by his appearance off of it. In his elegant tailored suits, he was the model of quiet elegance.

For all that, DiMaggio was an intensely private man who never felt completely comfortable in his role as hero. Before he became a national icon, he bore the additional, and unwanted, burden of being the great hero of Americans of Italian descent. Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez, a close friend, said, “All the Italians in America adopted him. Just about every day at home and on the road there would be an invitation from some Italian-American club.”20

For former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, DiMaggio’s life “demonstrated to all the strivers and seekers — like me — that America would make a place for true excellence whatever its color or accent or origin.”21 New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica acknowledged DiMaggio’s significance for his father and grandfather: “There was only one ballplayer for them, an Italian American ballplayer of such talent and fierce pride it made them fiercely proud, fiercely biased toward their man even after he had left the playing field for good.”22 Hall of Fame manager Tommy Lasorda summed it up this way: “I knew every big leaguer when I was growing up, but Joe DiMaggio was my hero. He was our hero; he was everything we wanted to be.”23

DiMaggio’s appeal to the general public was due, in part, to the stylish way he displayed his all-around ability as a ballplayer. But beyond that his colorless but dependable performance was right for the times. This sober, serious young man who went about his work without bravado or flamboyance was the ideal hero for a nation that was struggling, first to survive the Great Depression and then to win a war. The refrain of “Joe, Joe DiMaggio, we want you on our side,” from Les Brown’s 1941 hit song was a timely reflection of how the public identified with the young star.

The 1941 hitting streak, followed by his military service in World War II, helped DiMaggio become a national hero whose ethnic background, often noted by the pre-war press, became increasingly irrelevant. His fame and popularity were celebrated in song and literature as he became a touchstone of popular culture. In the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, sailors sing of the character named Bloody Mary that “her skin is tender as DiMaggio’s glove.” Santiago, the indomitable protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea, says that he must be worthy of his idol, the great DiMaggio. Paul Simon’s 1968 hit song, “Mrs. Robinson,” expressed nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time by asking, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

Unlike most professional athletes, Joe DiMaggio enjoyed a resurgence of fame and adulation in his post-baseball life. His legend was enhanced when, in January 1954, he once again made headlines by marrying Marilyn Monroe. But the ill-fated union of two of America’s most celebrated personalities lasted only nine months. DiMaggio had naively expected the film star to become a devoted housewife. According to Joe’s brother, Dom, “Her career was first. Joe could not condone the things that Marilyn had to do. Joe wanted a wife he could raise children with. She could not do that.” But DiMaggio, who remained devoted to Monroe, held out hope that they would remarry. “Joe had wanted that relationship to work,” said Dom. “He held on to it for the rest of his life.”24 When Monroe died in 1962, Joe took charge of her funeral and ordered that roses be placed at her crypt twice a week.

DiMaggio spent several years in relative obscurity before appearing, incongruously, in the green and white uniform of the Oakland A’s, serving as a coach and vice president for Charlie Finley’s newly-transplanted franchise in 1968-69. Then, in the 1970s, he re-emerged as a national celebrity when, overcoming the shyness that had inhibited him during his playing days, he became a television spokesman for New York’s Bowery Savings Bank and the “Mr. Coffee” coffee maker. For much of his life thereafter, DiMaggio remained in the public eye by carefully orchestrating appearances at celebrity golf outings, card shows and Old-Timers’ games, were he was introduced as “baseball’s greatest living player,” a title bestowed upon him in a 1969 poll. By limiting his personal appearances and rigidly protecting his privacy, he was able to sustain the mystique that made him one of the most admired men in America, even when his career was long over.

On October 12, 1998, DiMaggio was admitted to Regional Memorial Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, where he had been living for many years. (It was the same hospital where the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital had been established.) Two days later he underwent surgery for lung cancer and never fully recovered. He died at his home on March 8, 1999, at the age of 84.

One of those rare athletes — like Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali — who transcended the world of sport, DiMaggio has been called by more than one writer the last American hero. Revisionist historians later offered a more nuanced view, portraying him as a flawed hero who became increasingly reclusive and suspicious of others. Nevertheless, when he died his enduring status as a cultural icon was confirmed by an outpouring of adulation which few public figures, in any walk of life, could evoke. His death was front-page news in every major newspaper, was covered extensively on television newscasts and specials, and was the cover story in Newsweek magazine. Referring to the frequent bulletins on DiMaggio’s health that had been issued in the months prior to his death, Frank Deford wrote that it was “as if he were some great head of state.”25 As one Brooklyn native put it, DiMaggio “epitomized an era when, for a lot of us, baseball was the most important thing in life.”26

The answer to Paul Simon’s question — Where has Joe DiMaggio gone? — remains the same: Nowhere. He remains firmly lodged in the American consciousness as a stylish symbol of a time when baseball was the undisputed national pastime and America was enjoying unprecedented prosperity. On April 25, 1999, two months after his death, DiMaggio’s monument was unveiled in Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park, joining those honoring Miller Huggins, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, and Mickey Mantle. The inscription reads, in part, “A Baseball Legend and An American Icon.”

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also consulted:

Baldassaro, Lawrence. Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).

Cramer, Richard Ben. Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

DiMaggio, Dom, with Bill Gilbert. Real Grass, Real Heroes: Baseball’s Historic 1941 Season. 1990 (New York: Zebra Books, 1991).

Johnson, Richard A., and Glenn Stout. DiMaggio: An Illustrated Life (New York: Walker, 1995).

Kahn, Roger. The Era: 1947-1957, When the Yankees, the Giants and the Dodgers Ruled the World (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993).

Moore, Jack B. Joe DiMaggio: Baseball’s Yankee Clipper (New York: Praeger, 1987).

Seidel, Michael. Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ‘41 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988).

Notes

For indeed, Mike Donlin could hit as well as anyone in baseball during the Deadball Era. Though he rarely walked, the powerfully built 5-foot-9, 170-pound left-hander was a masterful curveball hitter with power to all fields. His career slugging percentage of .468 compares favorably to better-known contemporary hitters like Honus Wagner (.467) and Sam Crawford (.452), and his .333 lifetime batting average might have earned him a spot in the Hall of Fame had he sustained it over a full career. But Donlin’s love of the bottle and frequent stints in vaudeville limited him to the equivalent of only seven full seasons.

Michael Joseph Donlin was born on May 30, 1878, in Peoria, Illinois, and grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania. When he was 8 his parents, railroad conductor John Donlin and his wife, Maggie, were killed in a bridge collapse. Forced to hustle for a living, young Mike worked as a machinist and was often in poor health, with a concave chest due to consumption. At 15 he got a job as a candy seller on a California-bound train. Mike stayed in California, where he ran foot races and played baseball, and the sun helped him grow stronger.

According to San Diego baseball historian Bill Swank, Donlin first played baseball with the newly formed San Diego Mercantiles, a semipro nine.2 It was reported in his New York Times obituary that he later that year “entered professional baseball at Santa Cruz, Calif.”3 At this point, he was primarily a left-handed pitcher who also played some outfield. But his showy personality already was apparent, as was his understanding of the value of publicity. While playing for the Santa Cruz Sandcrabs, Donlin gave a photo of himself to San Francisco Examiner artist-sportswriter Hype Igoe, saying: “If you put a picture of me in the paper, I know I’ll get a break. I know I’m going to be great.”4 Tom Kelly, later the University of Oregon baseball coach, recalled pitching against Donlin a month after Admiral Dewey’s victory in the Battle of Manila Bay. His bat was painted red, white, and blue, and he called it “Dewey” — and Kelly thought the wannabe big leaguer had plenty of confidence and natural ability.

Halfway through the 1899 season, Donlin had appeared in 29 games for Santa Cruz and was batting .402. A correspondent for The Sporting News sent clippings about him to editor Joe Flanner in St. Louis, who passed them on to Patsy Tebeau, player-manager of the St. Louis Perfectos (who became the Cardinals the following season) — and the team acquired Donlin for “little more than train fare.”5 However, he learned he was going to the National League while locked up for drunkenness in a Santa Cruz jail. He reported to League Park in St. Louis wearing a medallion with a newspaper photo of himself on his lapel. When the gatekeeper refused him entry, he proclaimed “I am Mike Donlin,” and pointed to the clipping.6   

In his debut, on July 19, 1899, Donlin pitched in relief against Boston. Aware of Tebeau’s need for a shortstop, the left-hander volunteered and handled several chances in his first game. “I was swelled on myself at shortstop that first day,” he recalled.7 The next day, in front of a big crowd, Donlin mishandled every chance and made several wild throws. He was moved to first base in the fifth inning and had trouble there, too. After a few days Tebeau put Donlin in the outfield, where he played most of his career despite a continuing reputation for subpar defense. But he batted .323 for St. Louis in 1899 and .326 in 1900, and he would bat over .300 in most of his 12 seasons.

In 1901 Donlin jumped to the American League with the Baltimore Orioles. He soon became friends with his new manager, John McGraw, who admired the young slugger’s fiery temperament. One day in Detroit, Baltimore pitcher Harry Howell was ejected for arguing a call and Donlin responded by firing a ball at the umpire’s back. Of course, Donlin’s prowess at the plate also helped his standing with McGraw. On June 24, 1901, he got six hits in six at-bats: two singles, two doubles, and two triples. Donlin batted .340 in his first season as a full-time regular, and his future seemed unlimited. But in March 1902 he went on a drinking binge in Baltimore, urinated in public, and accosted two chorus girls.8 He was sentenced to six months in prison and the Orioles released him. Paroled a month early for good behavior, Donlin joined the Cincinnati Reds in August, appearing in only 34 games and batting a career-low .287.  

In 1903 Donlin managed to stay out of trouble — and he almost won the NL batting crown, hitting .351 to Honus Wagner’s .355. He finished second in runs (110) and triples (18) and third in slugging (.516). The next summer Donlin was hitting .356 when he went on another bender in St. Louis. Cincinnati player-manager Joe Kelley suspended him for 30 days and then traded him to the New York Giants, reuniting him with McGraw.

Upon arriving in New York, Donlin promised to curb his behavior — at least off the baseball diamond. On the field he slashed pitches into the gaps, ran the bases with reckless abandon, argued incessantly with umpires — and became a fan favorite in New York. Because of his strutting walk and red neck, he was dubbed “Turkey.” He hated the nickname but had such a following that kids imitated his strut. With his cap at a belligerent angle over one ear, a scar running down his left cheek from a knifing, and an ever-present plug of tobacco in his jaw, he looked the part of a rough, tough deadballer. When the Giants won their first pennant of the Deadball Era in 1904, Donlin was one of the team’s offensive stars, with his .329 average (between Cincinnati and New York) second in the NL to Wagner. The following year he was named captain and enjoyed his greatest season, batting a career-high .356, third best in the NL. Donlin led the league with 124 runs and was second with 216 hits. The Giants won the pennant again and Donlin hit .263 in New York’s World Series victory.

On April 11, 1906, Donlin married Mabel Hite, a pretty and talented comedian and top stage star. They first met in 1904 while she was on tour down south. “I didn’t know anything about baseball and didn’t care, and he was the same way about the stage,” Hite recalled. “We didn’t know we were interested in each other for two years after that, though I read the sporting pages of the newspapers for the first time and he began to scan the theatre notes.”9 The actress and the ballplayer reconnected in early 1906 and were wed two months later. The newspapers reported that marriage had tamed Donlin and loosened his attachment to the bottle. But Turkey Mike did not curb his quick temper. Upon his passing, it was recalled in his Chicago Tribune obituary that “In front of the old Knickerbocker hotel one night, as he was entering with his wife, an attorney named Edward N. Danforth brushed past and, Donlin told police, jostled and insulted Mrs. Donlin. The outcome was that Donlin and the attorney engaged in a fist fight until broken up by the arrival of police summoned by Mrs. Donlin.”10

Meanwhile, early in the 1906 season, Turkey Mike broke an ankle sliding, finishing his campaign after just 37 games and depriving him forever of his blazing speed. In the spring of 1907 he demanded the same $3,300 he had been paid in 1906, plus a $600 bonus if he stayed sober all year. Owner John Brush declined — and so Donlin held out and eventually went on the vaudeville circuit with his wife, missing the entire season. “It is too bad for him to give up baseball,” Hite admitted, “yet it’s so pleasant for us to be together. We study our parts together and rehearse at home.”11 And with characteristic confidence, Donlin proclaimed: “I can act. I’ll break the hearts of all the gals in the country.”12 Critics generally disagreed. Ward Morehouse, a theater reviewer, newspaper columnist, and playwright of note, pronounced that Turkey Mike “never was the actor he thought he was or wanted to be.”13   

Donlin, however, did return to the Giants for the 1908 season. Huge ovations greeted him at the home opener, with bleacherites yelling, “Oh, you Mabel’s Mike!” — a chant that emanated from the stands even when he made a routine play.14 In the ninth, the Giants were down by a run with two out and a man on second. Donlin worked the pitcher to a full count, then homered into the right-field bleachers to win the game. Thousands of fans mobbed the field, slapping him on his back as he rounded the bases, taking his cap, and ripping the buttons off his shirt — and it was the beginning of another great season for Donlin, who finished second in the NL in batting average (.334), hits (198), RBIs (106), total bases, and slugging percentage. After the season he was awarded the New York Journal trophy as New York’s most popular player.15 John Barrymore, one of Donlin’s best friends and drinking buddies, performed Hamlet’s soliloquy at a dinner in his honor.16 (Indeed, according to Gene Fowler, Barrymore’s biographer and close pal, the legendary actor was “at ease when among [his] friends,” and they included everyone from a troupe of dwarfs to Jack Dempsey, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein — and Mike Donlin. “It pleased him when any of these faces could be seen on his set or in his dressing-room,” Fowler noted.)17

On October 26, 1908, Hite and Donlin’s one-act play, Stealing Home, opened at the Hammerstein Theater in New York. “It is a great sketch,” proclaimed one reviewer the following year, “and made a tremendous hit with the baseball fans.” The scribe then described its plot: “Mike has a bad day on the diamond, he plays like a novice, and New York goes down to defeat before Pittsburg [sic]. Mike starts home, and had to steal in order to avoid the berating of his wife for poor playing, but he gets caught, however, and has an awful time trying to explain the reasons for his poor playing and the loss of the game.” (Several paragraphs later, the reviewer notes: “As a juggler W.C. Fields has few if any equals. He is an artist in his especial line and provokes much mirth with some of his juggling stunts.” So back in 1909, Donlin, Hite, and Stealing Home rated a more prominent notice than W.C. Fields.)18

While Stealing Home was acclaimed, however, reviews for the ballplayer-turned-actor were mixed. Some called him a delightful surprise, but another critic wrote: “Hite was so good she could carry him.”19 Yet Turkey Mike surely relished the praise he and his wife earned from one of the era’s most beloved figures. “Mike Donlin (and) his wife, Mabel Hite, received the biggest reception I ever heard on a stage,” observed Will Rogers two decades later.20

For the next couple of years the pair performed Stealing Home in front of sold-out houses from Boston to San Francisco. Initially, the ballplayer-turned-actor affirmed his allegiance to the game. “Baseball, boy, baseball,” he told a writer from the New York Review in 1909. “Baseball first and show business second. Maybe we’ll switch that order pretty soon, but right now your little playmate is mighty interested in the big game.” Yet Donlin was not bothered by his transformation from big leaguer to stage actor. He later noted: “You see when a man’s been playing baseball out in front of 30,000 people, and a lot of them of the critical sort, and mighty free with their remarks at that — well, it gives him a little assurance, enough, anyway, to let him get by when he faces an ordinary audience in a theater. So I’m not afraid on that score.”21

Nevertheless, the bottom line was that at the time, Donlin had abandoned sports because he was making more money in show business. So one of the greatest players of his era missed two more seasons during his prime. By 1911, however, Stealing Home had run its course and on April 24, he and Hite opened at New York’s Wallack’s Theatre in A Certain Party, a musical that lasted 24 performances. Turkey Mike thus was forced to return to baseball — and the Giants — albeit not without a healthy dose of puffery. “Donlin has given up the stage, temporarily at least, and is again a baseball player,” reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “The lure of the diamond was too much for the once famous scrapper, and, after being two seasons out of baseball, and as many in vaudeville, he decided that his place was in the outfield of some big league team.” The ballplayer declared: “I haven’t taken a drink in four years. … I feel as if I am as fast and can hit as well as ever.”22   

In reality, however, Donlin’s lengthy hiatus had taken a toll. He had as many arguments as hits for the Giants, and on August 1, 1911, he was sold to the lowly Boston Rustlers (who became the Braves the following season). Donlin played center field and batted .315, but the Rustlers didn’t need an aging star and his salary demands so they traded him to Pittsburgh. In 1912 Mike played 77 games, mainly in right field, for the Pirates and hit .316.

Donlin also supposedly had returned to baseball on the insistence of his wife. “Mickey’s place is on the diamond in the summer time,” Mabel Hite told the Post-Dispatch. “He can go back on the stage, if he wants to, but not until the 1912 season.”23 Tragically, it was just after that campaign that Hite died of intestinal cancer. The date was October 22. She was only 29 years old.

That same month, the Pirates put Turkey Mike on waivers. Philadelphia claimed him, but he announced his retirement. Late in the summer of 1913 Donlin attempted a comeback, playing 36 games with minor-league Jersey City. John McGraw then named him to a team that went on a postseason barnstorming tour through Europe, Asia, and Africa. Based on Donlin’s hitting on the tour, McGraw decided to give his old friend another chance. “The Apollo of the whack-stick is back with the Giants,” exclaimed the New York World.24 But the erstwhile star was washed up at age 36, managing only five hits in 31 at-bats in 1914.

On October 20, 1914, Mike wed Rita Ross, the niece of Charles J. Ross and Mabel Fenton Ross, a famed vaudeville comedy duo of the era. It was around this time that Donlin also returned to vaudeville, pairing with major-league hurler/high baritone tenor Marty McHale. “Mike and I were together for five years,” McHale told Lawrence S. Ritter, “doing a double-entendre act called ‘Right Off the Bat’ — not too much singing, Mike would only go through the motions — and we played the Keith-Orpheum circuit: twice in one year we were booked into the Palace in New York, and that was when it was the Palace. … They had nothing but the big headliners. When Mike left for Hollywood, I went back to doing a single.” Of their vaudeville success, McHale admitted: “Of course, Mike and I wouldn’t have been such an attraction if it hadn’t been for baseball.”25 Indeed, in McHale’s New York Times obituary, it was noted that the pair also teamed up in an act titled “Donlin of the Giants and McHale of the Yankees.”26

Prior to going Hollywood and commencing the second phase of his show-business career, Donlin appeared as himself in two 1914 releases: The Giants-White Sox Tour, a documentary featuring such luminaries as McGraw, Charles Comiskey, Christy Mathewson, Hans Lobert, and Jim Thorpe; and Our Mutual Girl, a weekly series of one-reel entertainments in which the title character (played by Norma Phillips) mixes with a host of celebrities. Donlin appears in Episode 10, along with McGraw, Comiskey, and Larry Doyle.

Then in 1915 Donlin began his screen acting career, starring in Right Off the Bat, a film that purportedly spotlighted his own life. The Moving Picture World promised that Right Off the Bat “ought to be a realistic baseball picture” as well as “a crime-free story presenting the career of Donlin from boyhood to manhood and a berth with the New York Giants.”27 Variety, the show-business trade publication, reported that Right Off the Bat was “devoted to his experiences as a semiprofessional ballplayer and his subsequent entrance into the National League, where he stood as a prominent star for a number of years and from which he retired with an envious record and a reputation that should assist materially in making ‘Right Off the Bat’ a financial success.” The paper labeled it “a cleverly constructed series of incidents that combine to make it an enjoyable feature throughout (its) five reels.”28

However, as often is the case with celluloid biopics, the facts were altered for the sake of marketing and entertainment value. Donlin’s Right Off the Bat hometown is Winsted, Connecticut, where the film was shot. His romantic interest is conjured up; as presented here, she is nothing like Mabel Hite, and neither his party boy personality, his troubles with the law, nor the trajectory of his baseball career are acknowledged. Right Off the Bat does chronicle Donlin’s ascent to major-league stardom, albeit in a circuitous manner. He first is seen as a young southpaw hurler and is played by 13-year-old Roy Hauck. Upon growing into adulthood, Donlin takes over the role. Though devoted to baseball, he toils as a machinist because of his shaky financial situation. Even though he has saved his beloved, Viola Bradley (Claire Mersereau), from drowning, Donlin is considered a poor marital prospect by her mother. He becomes a bush-league star; refuses to take a bribe to throw the championship game; is assaulted and locked in a room; arrives (with the aid of Viola) at the ballpark in time to score the winning run; and signs a New York Giants contract. Finally, he has earned the right to wed Viola. Two major figures in Donlin’s offscreen life appear in Right Off the Bat: John McGraw appears as himself, and Rita Ross Donlin plays Lucy, Viola’s friend.29

Still, Right Off the Batdoes hold a special place in the history of baseball-in-the-movies. Noted the New York Times: “For the first time baseball has been put on the screen in such a fashion that even an Englishman can understand it — and that, as (writer, playwright, and newspaper columnist) George Ade says, is Accomplishing the Impossible.”30 And Turkey Mike’s on-camera appeal was cited by Variety, which reported: “Mike was a distinct surprise and, contrary to custom, could pass as a film lead on ability alone, despite the professional reputation which is his principal asset in this effort. Mike registered the various required points exceedingly, displaying emotion, joy and disappointment with a perfected ease that even suggests a sequel to his early life.”31

There was, however, no Right Off the Bat, Part II — and the film was Donlin’s lone starring feature. For the time being, he returned to baseball; he managed a semipro team in New Jersey in 1916 and the next winter ran a baseball clinic and boxing tournament in Cuba. In 1917 Donlin managed the Memphis Chicks of the Southern League. At first he was popular with the fans, but they booed him when he put himself in to pitch and made a farce of the game. He quit the Chicks — or by some accounts was fired — in midseason. Later that year the War Department appointed him to teach baseball to US soldiers in France. In 1918 Donlin returned to California as a scout for the Boston Braves.

While occasionally reappearing on the stage (Donlin acted in Smooth as Silk, a melodrama that opened in New York’s Lexington Theatre in February 1921 and lasted 50 performances) he now primarily was a screen performer. He was helped by his friend John Barrymore, and his next film role was with the great actor in 1917’s Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. Turkey Mike appears briefly as Crawshay, a stickup man, and he shares several minutes of screen time in the company of Barrymore and an astonishingly young Frank Morgan, 22 years before playing his most celebrated screen role: the title character in The Wizard of Oz (1939). In the film, Donlin’s Crawshay points a gun at Barrymore’s Raffles and Morgan’s Bunny Manders. His intention is to pilfer some gems, which are referred to in the intertitles as “sparklers” and “dem jewels,” but is easily manipulated by the crafty Raffles.

Donlin also played Flask opposite Barrymore in The Sea Beast (1926), a Moby Dick adaptation. Other notable roles included a movie studio gateman in the Colleen Moore romantic comedy Ella Cinders (1926); a Union general in Buster Keaton’s The General (1927); Bill in Beggars of Life (1928), supporting Wallace Beery, Louise Brooks, and Richard Arlen; and Tout in Mae West’s She Done Him Wrong (1933). He appeared in and was the technical adviser for the baseball melodrama Slide, Kelly, Slide (1927) and had roles in other baseball features, including Hit and Run (1924), Warming Up (1928), Hot Curves (1930), and Swell-Head (1935). In Hot Curves, an early talkie (Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, The Sea Beast, and his initial credits are silent films), Donlin plays a gruff scout who signs frenetic, double-talking train concessionaire Benny Goldberg (Benny Rubin) to a contract. The scout utters a line that might have been ad-libbed by Donlin. It sounds like “I hope McGraw’ll be sold,” but the scout actually is referring to “McGrew,” his team’s skipper.

Donlin worked with such pantheon directors as John Ford, William A. Wellman, and Josef von Sternberg; he was employed by the A-list film studios; and he appeared in films starring a rainbow of screen legends. Yet just as often, his directors, co-stars, and films are long forgotten, and his studios were strictly Poverty Row. Increasingly, in many of his later films he even appears unbilled. In order to note his presence in a number of them, one has to stumble across him while watching the film. One such appearance is in Picture Snatcher, a 1933 James Cagney crime drama. The American Film Institute Catalog, Feature Films, 1931-1940, perhaps the definitive published reference on film credits for that decade, lists the bit players who appear in Picture Snatcher, cast in such roles as “fireman,” “head keeper,” “journalism student,” and even “sick reporter” and “reporter outside prison.” None is Mike Donlin. Yet there he is, unmistakable in one brief shot. He is seen in a pool hall, and he speaks the following words into a telephone: “No, Mr. McLean, he ain’t been around here in over a week.” After a brief pause, he adds: “Yeah, I’ll tell him.”32   

What may be Donlin’s most memorable screen appearance is equally fleeting. In one sequence in Riley the Cop (1928), a comedy-drama, a bunch of kids are playing baseball on an inner-city street. The title character (J. Farrell MacDonald) arrives on the scene to reprimand the lads and break up their game, yet the boyish Riley is quickly convinced to join the kids in their play. He picks up a bat and clumsily swings and misses at the first pitch tossed his way, in the process falling to the pavement. The cop does connect on his next swing, lifting a pop fly that crashes through a storefront window, necessitating the kids — and Riley — to scatter. After Riley’s swing and miss, director John Ford includes an all-too-brief shot of Donlin looking up and smiling, with a cigarette dangling from his lips. While he is not billed onscreen, various film references list the actor-ballplayer’s character as “Crook.” Thus, the implication is that Donlin’s character is amused because he is eluding the law while Riley is indulging in a child’s game. Yet given his background, the sequence — intentional or not — serves as an homage to Donlin’s past and a wink of the eye to anyone who recognizes him as an ex-major leaguer.33

Donlin’s most revealing late-career screen role, however, is in Madison Square Garden (1932). The film is a sports buff’s delight. A number of legendary scribes, among them Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, Paul Gallico, and Westbrook Pegler, make cameo appearances, and Turkey Mike and other celebrated athletes of his era appear as themselves. They include jockey Tod Sloan, wrestler Stanislaus Zybyszko, and boxers Tom Sharkey, Billy Papke, Tommy Ryan, and, most intriguingly, the controversial Jack “The Great White Hope” Johnson. All the ex-jocks portray low-level Garden employees; Johnson, who a decade earlier had appeared in As the World Rolls On (1921), in which he teaches baseball to a small but plucky lad who goes on to play for the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs, is reduced to impersonating a bug-eyed porter. Meanwhile, Donlin is cast as an usher. By then talking pictures were all the rage, and he has a pleasant speaking voice and an at-ease manner before the camera. With flagrant disregard of the Ruths, Cobbs, Speakers, Wagners, and other Hall of Famers of Donlin’s day, he is introduced as “the greatest ballplayer of all time.”34

Despite this accolade, Donlin at this point was experiencing chronic money troubles and was constantly scraping for jobs in baseball and acting. He also was dealing with health issues. The New York Times reported, “Athlete’s heart brought (him) virtual retirement in 1927,” at which time his “many friends among motion picture stars and stage actors” appeared in a minstrel show to raise money to send him to the Mayo Clinic for major surgery.35

While Donlin still managed to tackle roles on screen and stage, he was by this time viewed as a relic of an earlier era. In October 1930 he returned to Broadway, cast in a supporting role opposite Paul Muni in This One Man, a Sidney Buchman drama that lasted 39 performances. “Though it is faintly possible that there are adult men and women now living to whom the name Mike Donlin is the name of just another actor,” one observer noted, “astute listeners who hear him speak his lines with some conviction these days … know very well where Mr. Donlin got his training. It was not in the theatre, but in the old-time ball parks. … In his time, however, (ballplayers) were all orators, and often very gifted ones, at that.”36

At this time, Turkey Mike still wanted to get back into baseball, and in the spring of 1933 he asked a friend if he could get a coaching job with the Giants. But on September 24, 1933, he was felled by a heart attack in his sleep at his Hollywood home. Upon his death, New York Times sportswriter John Drebinger wrote: “A glamorous figure was Turkey Mike, the first of a long list of notables who came with the dawn of what might be called the modern era of baseball. … Turkey Mike was one of the first to grip and captivate the imagination of the public. The Mattys, Cobbs and Ruths came later. He was scrappy and witty, and for all his worldliness there was about him a certain naïveté which was not the least of his charming qualities.”37

And then, two years later, Drebinger reported that the “committee conducting the baseball centennial celebration to be held in 1939 at Cooperstown, N.Y., commemorating the 100th anniversary of the origin of America’s national pastime, has asked the scribes to assist in selecting the first group of names to be inscribed on tablets in the Hall of Fame.” After citing such inner-circle superstars as Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker and second-line talents Wee Willie Keeler, Ed Delahanty, Ross Youngs, Ed Roush, and Al Simmons, Drebinger quipped: “There are any number of others you might feel privileged to add to the general confusion.” And one of them was “… the unforgettable Mike Donlin…”38

An earlier version of this biography originally appeared in SABR’s “Deadball Stars of the National League” (Brassey’s, 2004), edited by Tom Simon. It also appeared in “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors“ (SABR, 2018), edited by Rob Edelman and Bill Nowlin.
 

Sources

For this biography, a number of contemporary sources, especially those found in the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, are cited.

Notes

1 https://thedeadballera.com/BeerDrinkersMikeDonlin.html.

2 Bill Swank, Baseball in San Diego: From the Plaza to the Padres (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2005), 31.

3 “Mike Donlin Dead; Once With Giants,” New York Times, September 25, 1933: 15.

4 Hype Igoe, “Donlin Own Press Agent in Turkey Trot to Top,” The Sporting News,January 25, 1945.

5 Quoted in an unidentified St. Louis paper, dated November 7, 1940, in Donlin’s Baseball Hall of Fame player file.

6 Associated Press, “Donlin, Giant of 1905, Dead,” unidentified newspaper clipping found in Donlin’s Baseball Hall of Fame player file.

7 Quoted in an unidentified newspaper clipping found in the Hall of Fame file for Donlin.

8 Craig R. Wright, “Turkey Mike Donlin,” baseballspast.com

9 Ada Patterson, “The ‘Make-Up Half Hour With Mabel Hite,” The Theatre, July 1911: 32.

10 “Mike Donlin, Star with Giants Early in Century, Dies at 56,” Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1933: 19.

11 Ibid.

12 Wright.

13 Ward Morehouse, “Donlin a Colorful Figure,” New York Sun, September 25, 1933.

14 David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball, Volume II: From the Commissioners to Continental Expansion (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), 64.

15 Max Kase, “Suite to the Taste,” New York Journal-American,May 18, 1964.

16 Ibid.

17 Gene Fowler, Good Night, Sweet Prince (New York, Viking Press, 1944), 190.

18 Rob Edelman, Great Baseball Films (New York, Citadel Press, 1994), 27.

19 Joe Williams, “Sports Stars Get the Beauties in Cupid’s League,” unknown publication found in Hall of Fame file stamped as January 23, 1954.

20 “Mr. Rogers Arises to Applaud Some Stars of Yesteryear,” New York Times, March 25, 1932: 21.

21 Edelman, Great Baseball Films, 27.

22 “Mike Donlin Will Do No Stage Stint This Winter; His Wife Won’t Let Him,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 6, 1911: 8.

23 Ibid.

24 “Mike Donlin, the ‘Come-Back,’” The World Magazine,March 29, 1914.

25 John Thorn, ed., The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball(New York: Galahad Books, 1997), 254.

26 “Martin Joseph McHale, Former Yankee Pitcher,” New York Times, May 10, 1979: D23.

27 “Donlin Plays in Bush League,” The Moving Picture World, August 7, 1915, 1000.

28 Wynn, “Right Off the Bat,” Variety, October 1, 1915: 18.

29 Rob Edelman, “The Baseball Film to 1920,” Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, Spring 2007: 29.

30 “In the Movies,” New York Times, October 10, 1915: 102.

31 Wynn.

32 Rob Edelman, “Turkey Mike Donlin in the Movies,” The Baseball Research Journal, Number 30, 2001: 74.

33 Ibid.

34 Edelman, Great Baseball Films, 29.

35 “Mike Donlin Dead; Once With Giants.”

36 “Lines for Scrapbooks: Mr. Donlin and Two Actresses, Who Seem to Be Helen Mehrmann and Armida,” New York Times, November 2, 1930: X4.

37 John Drebinger, “Sports of the Times: Turkey Mike Passes On,” New York Times, September 27, 1933: 26.

38 John Drebinger, “Sports of the Times: Only Standing Room Left,” New York Times, December 26, 1935: 24.

“He hit me more than anyone else. He kept me going like a rocking chair. That night, I always felt like I had been wrestling a bear. I was so tired when I left the ballpark. But I respected him for the way he went about his job.” — Frank Robinson, Cincinnati Reds2

“I know Don Drysdale is trying to hit me. He’ll even come to the batting cage and say, ‘Where do you want it today, big boy?’” — Mickey Mantle, New York Yankees3

The first World Series game at Dodger Stadium was played on October 5, 1963. The ballpark had opened its gates the previous season. Over the following six decades Dodger Stadium served as the backdrop for some of the greatest moments in major-league history. On October 5, the Dodgers’ opponent was the New York Yankees. The Yankees were a particular thorn in the side of the Dodgers, going back to their days in Brooklyn when the Bronx Bombers won six of seven World Series from the neighboring borough.

But as Don Drysdale took the hill for Game Three, his teammates had to be feeling quite confident. Los Angeles had won the first two games of the Series at Yankee Stadium, in rather convincing manner. Sandy Koufax struck out 15 batters in the 5-2 Dodgers win in Game One. Johnny Podres was not as overpowering in Game Two, but still won, 4-1. In starting the two left-handers at Yankee Stadium. Dodgers’ manager Walt Alston pushed Drysdale, the winner of 19 games and the reigning NL Cy Young Award winner, back to Game Three.

The Dodgers reached the Yankees’ Jim Bouton for a run in the bottom of the first inning. Jim Gilliam walked, went to second base on a wild pitch, and scored on a single by Tommy Davis. But that was all the offense the Dodgers could muster. Drysdale would have to be on top of his game to bring home the win. In the top of the third, Tony Kubek reached base on an error by Maury Wills. Not to worry; Drysdale picked Kubek off.

The final out caused the most angst for Drysdale and the Dodger fans. With two outs Joe Pepitone lifted a fly ball to right field. Right fielder Ron Fairly drifted back to the track, just short of the fence in front of the Yankees bullpen, to haul it in. “Pepitone hit it real good and I saw Fairly going back until he was almost touching the fence,” Drysdale said. “Then he stopped and put his glove up and I knew I had won the game.”4 Drysdale struck out nine and scattered three hits while going the distance to stake the Dodgers to a 3-0 advantage in the series. “The extra rest helped me,” Drysdale said. “I felt strong. I know I was pitching high, but the Yankees were apparently looking for low stuff, so I just stayed high.”5 Alston praised his right-handed hurler, saying, “He had the left-handers to contend with and he didn’t make a mistake all through the game. His control was never better.”6

Donald Scott Drysdale was born to Scott and Verna Drysdale on July 23, 1936, in Van Nuys, California. Scott Drysdale was a repair supervisor for the Pacific Telephone Company, which provided a comfortable middle-class upbringing. Scott had a brief career as a minor-league pitcher in 1935, the year before Don was born.

Drysdale credited his father with his early love of baseball. “We played catch in the afternoon,” he said. “Often we’d go to the playground and Dad would hit me grounders and flies and I would take batting practice. He really taught me the game.”7

It was not until his senior year at Van Nuys High School that Drysdale tried his hand at pitching. He posted a 10-1 record. Brooklyn signed the former second baseman to a $4,000 bonus contract. He was assigned to Bakersfield of the Class C California League. An astute observer, Branch Rickey, then with the Pittsburgh Pirates, scouted the 17-year-old pitcher and on June 15, 1954, wrote:

“A lot of artistry about this boy. Way above average fast ball. It is really good. Direction of the spin and the speed of rotation the same on all fast ball pitches. Angle of delivery is the same, stride is wide and his body is in all pitches. The pitching hand, and placement on fast and curve ball needs no coaching. He is good.”8

Drysdale pitched well enough at Bakersfield (8-5, 3.46) to earn a promotion to Montreal of the International League in 1955. He started the season 10-2, but injured his right hand, and continued to pitch with the pain. It proved to be a broken bone and Drysdale lost nine games in the second half of the season to go 11-11. The next year he was promoted to Brooklyn, although Drysdale conceded that it took some good fortune to land him there. “I never would have made the majors the next season if luck wasn’t with me,” he wrote. “The Dodgers lost Johnny Podres to the Navy, and Billy Loes, Don Bessent, and Karl Spooner got hurt. Stuck for pitchers, the club took me, in desperation.”9

It may have been luck that got Drysdale to Brooklyn, but it was skill that kept him there. He pitched in 25 games, mostly as a spot starter and reliever. But he showed enough (5-5, 2.64) to stay with the team all season. Trailing Milwaukee by one game, the Dodgers won the pennant by sweeping the Pirates as the Braves lost two of three at St. Louis. In the World Series, they took a 2-0 lead against the Yankees. But their old nemesis took four of the next five games to win the world championship.

Drysdale was promoted to starter in 1957 and led the club with a 17-9 record. His 2.69 ERA was tied for second in the league with Warren Spahn, right behind his teammate Podres’ 2.66. Drysdale’s best effort was a two-hitter against Philadelphia. He struck out six and gave up an unearned run in the 5-1 Brooklyn victory.

The young side-armer was getting a reputation as a headhunter in only his second season. With his 6-foot-6, 190-pound frame, Drysdale was an intimidating sight to most batters. On June 13, 1957, against the Milwaukee Braves. “Big D,” as he was often called, was not having one of his better days. Bill Bruton homered to begin the game. In the second inning Bobby Thomson doubled and came home on a double by Carl Sawatski. Bruton followed with his second round-tripper. The Braves were up 4-0. “Johnny Logan was up next,” recalled Drysdale. “He was strutting around up there and digging in and showing me his teeth and acting like he owned the place. A charge went right through me. I look at this guy and tell myself, ‘Okay Buster, you asked for it.’ And I aim one inside to let him know who’s boss.”10 The baseball nearly took Logan’s head off his shoulders as he spun out of the way and got hit at the base of his neck. Logan jogged to first base, all the time jawing at Drysdale and Don giving it right back. As Logan took his lead off first, Drysdale threw over in a pickoff attempt. First baseman Gil Hodges stuck out his glove, but missed the ball. Johnny was beaned yet again. Logan charged the mound and set off one of the biggest donnybrooks in years. There was a near-riot as both benches emptied. Drysdale was attacked from all sides, and when the dust cleared, he and Logan were ejected. The Braves had their own nickname for him, the Shooting Gallery Kid.

That 1957 season was a watershed year for major-league baseball. Although expansion had been a movement in recent years, no team moved west of St. Louis or the Mississippi River. Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley and New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham both saw the infinite possibilities for growth on the West Coast. Even though the Dodgers had drawn more than a million to Ebbets Field in 1955, O’Malley was not fond of the park, which was surrounded by a congested and deteriorating neighborhood. The Dodgers moved a handful of home games to Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City in 1956 and 1957. With cities like Hoboken and Union City to draw from, it also had 10,000 parking spaces, compared with several hundred at Ebbets.

Although the move of games to Jersey was a ploy to strong-arm Brooklyn for a new ballpark, in September 1957 the Dodgers signed a deal to move to Los Angeles for the following season. They would build a new ballpark on 300 acres of land within Chavez Ravine. Similarly, Stoneham moved the Giants to San Francisco.

From 1958 through 1961 the Dodgers played their home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Coliseum was one of the great football stadiums of all time, serving as the home field for the Los Angeles Rams and the University of Southern California Trojans. The seating capacity was 90,000 and it easily set baseball attendance records. Because it was built for football, and was in the shape of an oval, it lent itself to some strange dimensions. It was 250 feet to left field, 320 feet to left-center, 425 feet to center field, and 440 feet to right-center field. Hence, 260-foot home runs and 430-foot fly outs were a common sight for the fans.

The 1958 Dodgers finished under .500 for the first time since 1938 (not including the 1944 war year record of 69-85) with a record of 71-83. It was not all bad for Drysdale, though. He married Ginger Dubberly, a model and former Rose Bowl Parade Queen, in September 1958. They had one child, a daughter, Kelly.

In 1959 Drysdale led the team in wins with 17 and the league in strikeouts with 242. He also led the league in hit batsmen with 18. He made the first of nine All-Star Game appearances on July 7 at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, as he got the starting assignment for the National League and pitched three hitless innings. (There were two All-Star Games that season. Drysdale also started the second one, on August 3, and took the loss, giving up three runs in three innings.)

The Dodgers finished strong in 1959, coming from third place on September 14 to overtake the Braves and the Giants for the pennant. They won 9 of 11 down the stretch. Their opponent in the World Series was the Chicago White Sox, a team built on pitching, defense, and speed. The White Sox drubbed LA in the opener, 11-0 behind Early Wynn. But the Dodgers came back to win the next four of five, with Drysdale picking up the 3-1 victory in Game Three.

Over the next three seasons the Dodgers fell short in their bid to return to the World Series. Drysdale led the league again in strikeouts in 1960 with 246 and hit batsmen with 10. The following year he hit 20 batters to pace the senior circuit.

Drysdale put it all together in 1962. He posted a 25-9 record with a 2.83 ERA. He led the league in wins, starts (41), innings pitched (314⅓), and strikeouts (232). His 41 starts were the most by a Dodgers hurler since Oscar Jones started 41 games in 1904. It was the first of four straight years in which Drysdale led the NL in starts. “Batting against him is the same as making a date with the dentist,” said Pittsburgh’s Dick Groat.11 “Drysdale has simply got more stuff than ever before,” said Alston.12 Drysdale won the Cy Young Award and was named The Sporting News Player and Pitcher of the Year.

Sandy Koufax, who like Drysdale began his career back in Brooklyn, was mostly a .500 pitcher until the 1961 season, when he hurled his way to an 18-13 record. Beginning in 1962, he led the National League in ERA for five straight seasons. He gave the opposition a much-dreaded combination of power pitchers, one right-handed and Koufax left-handed. He didn’t intimidate batters the way Drysdale did by plunking them. Koufax had 18 hit batsmen in his career. He intimidated them with his speed, as he was considered one of the fastest pitchers to ever toe the rubber in the major leagues.

Drysdale may have felt his 1962 awards bittersweet. The Dodgers had put together a seven-game winning streak to take a four-game lead over San Francisco on September 15. But they could muster only three more wins the rest of the season, which placed them in a tie with the Giants at the end of 154 games. The Giants won a best-of-three playoff in three games and advanced to the World Series.

After celebrating the world championship in 1963, the Dodgers slumped in 1964, finishing two games under .500. But they resurfaced to win the pennant in 1965. Drysdale (23 victories) and Koufax (26) accounted for more than half of the team’s 97 victories. “When you’ve been pitching on the same staff for as long as we have, you know when the other one is doing something right or wrong,” said Koufax. “We’re quick to tell the other one about it, too.”13 Drysdale threw a one-hitter against Bob Gibson and St. Louis on May 25. He was no slouch at the plate that season, tying his career high with seven home runs, driving in a career-best 19 runs, and batting .300.

Going into September, the Dodgers sat atop the standings with a 1½-game lead over San Francisco and two games over Milwaukee and Cincinnati. But a 22-8 record, which included a 13-game winning streak (from September 16 to 30) helped LA distance itself from the others.

The World Series started off bleakly for the Dodgers. They dropped the first two games to Minnesota at Metropolitan Stadium, Drysdale and Koufax taking the losses. Both pitchers won the next games; Drysdale fanned 11 Twins in a 7-2 win in Game Four. Koufax won the seventh game, 2-0, to secure another world championship for Los Angeles. “I threw one bad pitch and Harmon Killebrew hit for a home run and I got a curve up high on Tony Oliva and he smacked it out,” said Drysdale after his victory in Game Four. “When I saw my breaking stuff wasn’t working too well early in the game, I went to my fastball. But the main thing was that I kept moving the ball around, inside and out, and I thought I was setting up the batters pretty well.”14

After battling San Francisco again, the Dodgers won the pennant once more in 1966, but were swept by the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. Drysdale (13-16) had his first losing season since 1958. He lost two World Series games. He pitched well in Game Four, but was outdueled, 1-0, by Dave McNally, on a home run by Frank Robinson.

An arthritic elbow forced Koufax to retire after the 1966 season, prematurely ending his great career at the age of 30. Even though the Dodgers were not an offensive power, the great pitching of Koufax, Drysdale, and Claude Osteen had always given the team a chance to win.

From May 14 to June 8, 1968, Drysdale set a record for consecutive scoreless innings pitched. His new mark was 58⅔ innings, breaking the record of 56 innings set by Walter Johnson in 1913. In three of the games during the streak, the margin of error was slim. Drysdale beat the Cubs and the Astros by a 1-0 score. He topped the Cardinals in another, 2-0. The string ended when Philadelphia scored a run in the fifth inning of a 5-3 LA win at Dodger Stadium. “I have two things to say about Drysdale,” said Phillies manager Gene Mauch. “He’s a hell of a man and the most knowledgeable pitcher in the game. We didn’t think much about the record but I know he was thinking about it, and has for a long time. He’s been through a hell of an emotional strain.” 15

Drysdale struck out Clay Dalrymple to end the second inning to set the record with his 56 consecutive scoreless inning. “I wanted the record so bad,” said Drysdale, “but I’m relieved that it’s over. I could feel myself go ‘blah’ when the run scored. I just let down completely. I’m sure it was the mental strain.”16

Twenty years later, Drysdale was working in his first year as a broadcaster for the Dodgers. On September 28, 1988, Orel Hershiser was zeroing in on Drysdale’s scoreless-innings record. When Hershiser tied the mark pitching against San Diego, he asked to be removed from the game, out of respect for Drysdale. But manager Tommy Lasorda and pitching coach Ron Perranoski persuaded him to go for the record, and he set a new record: 59 scoreless innings. (Hershiser pitched 10 scoreless innings in that game.) When Drysdale was told that Hershiser wanted to be taken out of the game, he said “I would have gone out there and kicked him in the rear.”17

Recurring shoulder injuries slowed Drysdale down. He was an ironman as pitchers go, as he started 35 or more games for nine straight seasons. His injury, which was diagnosed as a torn rotator cuff, never got better. After making just 12 starts in 1969, Drysdale retired as a player. In 14 seasons, all with the Dodgers, he compiled a record of 209-166 with an ERA of 2.95. He struck out 2,486 batters, posted 49 shutouts and hit 154 batters. He struck out 200 or more batters six times. Drysdale hit 29 home runs, sixth all-time for pitchers. He was 3-3 in the World Series, with an ERA of 2.95. He pitched in eight All-Star Games.

Drysdale never left the game. He went right to the broadcast booth. Drysdale was a radio and TV color man for the Montreal Expos (1970-1971), Texas Rangers (1972), California Angels (1973-1979, 1981), Chicago White Sox (1982-1987), and the Dodgers (1988-1993). He broadcast regional and national telecasts for both NBC and ABC. For ABC he contributed to Wide World of Sports and Superstars. His good looks made him a natural for television shows. He made cameo appearances on The Brady Bunch, Beverly Hillbillies, Leave It to Beaver and the Donna Reed Show, among others.

Don and Ginger divorced in 1982. In 1986 Drysdale married Ann Meyers, a college basketball player who was an All-American at UCLA and is a member of the National Basketball Hall of Fame. She was the only woman to be signed to a professional contract in the NBA, with the Indiana Pacers in 1979. They had three children — two boys, Don Jr. and Darren, and a daughter, Drew. “I won’t play against her, she’s too tough one-on-one,” said Drysdale.18.

On August 12, 1984, Drysdale was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame with Harmon Killebrew, Pee Wee Reese, Rick Ferrell, and Luis Aparicio. Drysdale was in his 10th year of eligibility and received 78 percent of the vote.

In 1990 Drysdale published his autobiography, Once a Bum, Always a Dodger, written with Bob Verdi. Drysdale gave readers a candid look into his baseball career and his personal life.

Drysdale died on July 3, 1993 of a heart attack in Montreal, where he was with the Dodgers to broadcast a Dodgers-Expos series. A week earlier, the Dodger family had lost Roy Campanella, also to a heart attack. “I think God need a battery, because he got one of the best that heaven could have ever accepted,” said Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda.19

On July 9, 1961, the Cincinnati Reds were playing the Dodgers at the Los Angeles Coliseum. The Reds were atop the National League standings, and the Dodgers were four games behind them in second place. Drysdale came into the game in the fifth inning as a reliever. When the Dodgers came to bat, they were down 7-2. Reds second baseman Don Blasingame was knocked down on a pitch that whizzed by his head, courtesy of Drysdale, to lead off the sixth inning. Big D received a warning from home-plate umpire Dusty Boggess. Blasingame popped out and the next batter was Vada Pinson, who doubled. Frank Robinson stepped to the plate.

Drysdale’s offering was an inside pitch that sent Robinson sprawling. Boggess again came out to warn Drysdale. “Shit, Dusty,” said Drysdale. “What do you want me to do? Lay the ball right down the middle so he can beat my brains in?”20 Drysdale came inside with the next pitch, and hit Robinson on the right forearm. Boggess immediately ejected Drysdale.

The next day, Drysdale was given a five-game suspension and fined $100 by National League President Warren Giles. Drysdale decided to pay his debt in person. The next time the Dodgers were in Cincinnati, where Giles had his office, Drysdale stopped at a bank and got $100 worth of pennies. He emptied all of the pennies into a sack, walked to Giles’ office, and placed them on the desk of Giles’ secretary. He walked back to his hotel room, feeling proud of himself, when the phone rang and he was summoned back to Giles’ office. The conversation was amiable and it ended with Giles saying, “And by the way, I want you to take those pennies of yours and roll them back up for me.”21 Drysdale spent the next few hours cursing and rolling pennies.

Don Drysdale may have been rolling pennies, but to Dodger fans, he was a million-dollar pitcher.

Last revised: November 3, 2021 (zp)

This biography originally appeared in “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors“ (SABR, 2018), edited by Rob Edelman and Bill Nowlin.

Notes

1 When It Was a Game III, HBO Sports, 2000.

2 Ibid.

3 “Suddenly, Don’s Gone Too,” New York Daily News, July 5, 1993: 48.

4 “Drive by Pepitone Produced One of Big Thrills of Game,” The Sporting News, October 19, 1963: 27.

5 “Drysdale Sparkles, Blanks Bombers With 3-Hit Gem”, The Sporting News, October 19, 1963: 27.

6 Bill Becker, “Drysdale Had Visions of Pepitone’s Last-Out Drive Going Into the Seats”, New York Times, October 6, 1963: S-3.

7 Melvin Durslag, “L.A.’s Fiery Strike-Out Artist,” Saturday Evening Post, July 1, 1961: 56.

8 Branch Rickey Papers at the Library of Congress; Don Drysdale player file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

9 Drysdale player file.

10 Al Stump, “Headhunter With a Horsehide,” True Magazine, May, 1980: 102.

11 Bob Hunter, “Drysdale Crowned Slab King of Year,” The Sporting News, November 17, 1962: 1.

12 Huston Horn, “Ex-Bad Boy’s Big Year,” Sports Illustrated, August 20, 1962.

13 Bob Hunter, “Sandy and Big D Super Stoppers,” The Sporting News, July 17, 1965: 4.

14 “Speed-Boy Dodgers Force Twins Into Key Blunders,” The Sporting News, October 23, 1965: 27.

15 Al Goldfarb, “Don Drysdale: What Does He Do for an Encore?” Complete Sports, May 1969.

16 Ibid.

17 Steve Wulf, “Deep Roots,” Sports Illustrated, December 19, 1988: 69.

18 Ross Forman, “Don Drysdale Reflects on HOF Career,” Sports Collectors Digest, June 28, 1991: 111.

19 Associated Press, July 13, 1993, in Drysdale player file.

20 Don Drysdale with Bob Verdi, Once a Bum, Always a Dodger (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 181.

21 Drysdale and Verdi, 182.

Although he pitched in only 58 major-league games in his tragically brief career, Mark Fidrych made an enduring impression on the history and culture of professional baseball. Fidrych had one stellar season, in 1976.That season, he first made an impression on baseball fans with his pitching prowess when he came out of nowhere to become one of the best pitchers in baseball. But it was Fidrych’s antics on the mound, his genuine exuberance in playing the game, and his “just folks” persona that made a permanent impact on the American public and brought Fidrych his lasting fame, making him one of the most inspirational players in the history of the game.

Mark Steven Fidrych was born August 14, 1954, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Paul and Virginia Fidrych. He grew up in the town of Northboro, Massachusetts, where his father was a public-school teacher. Fidrych went to Algonquin High School in Northboro, where he played baseball as well as basketball and football. Because Mark was held back two years while in elementary school, in his senior year he attended a private school, Worcester Academy; age restrictions would have prevented him from playing sports in public school. While he was not a star pitcher in high school and was not offered any collegiate athletic scholarships, Mark caught the attention of both the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers on the strength of his hard fastball. On the recommendation of Joe Cusick, the New England scout for the Detroit Tigers, Fidrych was selected in the 10th round of the 1974 free-agent draft.

Fidrych began his professional career in 1974, pitching as a reliever in the Appalachian League for the Bristol Tigers. He was tall, at 6-feet-3, and lanky, weighing only 175 pounds, and had a mop-top of curly blond hair. At Bristol Fidrych was given his nickname, “Bird,” by coach Jeff Hogan.1 Hogan thought Fidrych looked like Big Bird from the television show Sesame Street, and the name stuck.

After the 1974 season, Fidrych played winter ball in the Florida Instructional League to prep for the 1975 season. In that season he progressed rapidly through three levels of the Tigers’ minor-league system. He began the year in the Class-A Florida State League as a starting pitcher for the Lakeland Tigers. Although he pitched well, recording 73 strikeouts in 117 innings, he had a losing record, 5-9.2 Fidrych was promoted in midseason to the Montgomery Rebels of the Double-A Southern League. He pitched for Montgomery for only about two weeks and was used exclusively as a reliever. Fidrych was then sent to the Evansville Triplets of the Triple-A American Association, where he once again pitched as a starter. While in Double A and Triple A, Fidrych developed a changeup to go along with his fastball. He also markedly improved his control, walking relatively few batters. In Evansville Fidrych hit his stride, posting an ERA of 1.58 and striking out 29 while walking only 9 in 40 innings. To finish off the season, he started the American Association championship game, going 12 innings for the win. After the season Fidrych again pitched instructional league ball to prepare for the year ahead.

To begin the 1976 season, the 21-year-old Fidrych was promoted to Detroit’s major-league roster. The Tigers had traded their best pitcher, Mickey Lolich, after the 1975 season, and sold Joe Coleman to the Chicago Cubs when the season was two months old, creating openings in the starting rotation. Fidrych began the season in the bullpen and made only two appearances, both in relief, on April 20 and May 5, during the first five weeks of the season. When Coleman came down with the flu and could not make his scheduled start on May 15, Fidrych was given a chance to start at home against the Cleveland Indians. In what may have been his best outing in what proved to be a spectacular pitching season, Fidrych did not allow a hit for the first six innings and pitched a complete game, giving up one run on only two hits and one walk, for his first major-league win. Catching that game was the Tigers’ backup catcher, Bruce Kimm. Because of their success in this game, Kimm became Fidrych’s personal catcher and caught all 29 of his starts that season.

Fidrych had developed into a control pitcher with a good fastball. Ralph Houk, his manager with the Tigers, described him as having “unbelievable control with a fastball that moved.”3 One prominent feature of Fidrych’s pitching was that he worked very fast. Bill James calculated the game time for all starting pitchers in 1976, and found Fidrych to be the fastest-working pitcher in the American League, with an average game time of 2 hours and 11 minutes, 17 minutes quicker than the league average.4

Despite his performance, Fidrych was not yet made a regular starter for the Tigers. Ten days after defeating Cleveland, he started again, versus the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Though he pitched another complete game, Fidrych and the Tigers lost, 2-0, on a two-run home run by Carl Yastrzemski. But based on his strong performance, Fidrych became a regular starter for the Tigers, and won his next eight starts.

Soon after he became a regular starter, sportswriters covering the Tigers began to write about Fidrych’s antics on the playing field. A June 5 article in The Sporting News described him on the mound: “He talks to the ball. … He talks to himself. … He gestures toward the plate, pointing out the path he wants the pitch to take. … He struts in a circle around the mound after each out, applauding his teammates and asking for the ball. … And he’s forever chewing gum and patting the dirt on the mound with his bare hand.” The article quoted Fidrych as saying, “I really don’t know what I do out there. That’s just my way of concentrating and keeping my head in the game.”5

The game that firmly established the legend of Mark Fidrych was one on June 28 against the New York Yankees. The national media had picked up on both Fidrych’s success — he was now 7-1 — and his antics on the field. In turn, baseball fans and the American public were taking notice of the Bird. The game, pitting Fidrych against the first-place Yankees, was televised nationally on ABC’s Monday Night Baseball and received a great deal of attention. Fans came in droves to attend the game at Tiger Stadium; 47,855 people got in, and it was reported that another 10,000 were turned away more than an hour before the game was scheduled to start.6 Fidrych shut down the Yankees, allowing seven hits, no walks, and just a solo homer by Elrod Hendricks as the Tigers won 5-1. Chants of “Go Bird Go!” echoed through the crowd during the game. The Yankees, however, were unimpressed with Fidrych and his nonpitching actions on the field. In particular, Thurman Munson, who did not play in the game because of a bruised knee, was angry and felt that Fidrych was showing up the Yankees. He was quoted as saying, “Tell that guy if he pulls that stuff in New York, we’ll blow his —— out of town.” Willie Randolph, who admitted that he was distracted during his first at-bat against Fidrych, simply said, “You want to send a line drive right through his head.”7

Tigers fans, however, were ecstatic. When the game, ended, Fidrych ran around the infield, shaking the hands of his teammates before going into the dugout and clubhouse to the ovation of the fans. After the game, as a light rain fell on the crowd, the fans did not leave. They chanted “We want the Bird! We want the Bird!” Fidrych finally returned the field, laughing and smiling at the crowd as he tipped his cap to them. Bob Prince, who was announcing the game on ABC, said that in his 35 years in baseball, he had never seen anything like this, and that it gave him goose bumps. Ernie Harwell later wrote that he thought Fidrych to be “the first big-leaguer to take curtain calls on a regular basis.”8

After the game Tigers right fielder Rusty Staub said of Fidrych: “It’s no act. There’s nothing contrived about him and that’s what makes him a beautiful person.”9 Staub continued, “There’s an electricity that he brings out in everyone, the players and the fans. He’s different. He’s a 21-year-old kid with a great enthusiasm that everyone loves. He has an inner youth, an exuberance.”10

His defeat of the Yankees made Fidrych a huge star. Having amassed a record of 9-2 and an ERA of 1.78, he was named the starter for the American League for the 1976 All-Star Game. Fidrych gave up two runs in the first inning of the game and was charged with the loss as the American League lost, 7-1.11 Fidrych bounced back from the All-Star Game loss to finish the season with a record of 19-9 while posting an American League-best ERA of 2.34. He also led the league in complete games, with 24 complete games, including five in extra innings, among his 29 starts. He won the American League Rookie of the Year Award and came in second, behind Jim Palmer, for the AL Cy Young Award. The Tigers finished with a record of 74-87, 24 games behind the American League East-winning Yankees.

When Fidrych started his first game against the Indians, there was a crowd of 14,583 at Tiger Stadium. Against the Yankees that June 28, the crowd was 47,855. For the remainder of the season, whether the team was on the road or in Detroit, huge crowds came to see Fidrych pitch. Three of his starts attracted more than 50,000. Attendance at Tigers games went from 1,058,836 in 1975 to 1,467,020 in 1976, an increase of almost 39 percent.

Despite his stardom, Fidrych still demonstrated his innocence in the world of big-time sports, as evidenced by the contract he signed after the 1976 season. Although agents flocked to him, Fidrych resisted signing with one as he and his father negotiated directly with the Tigers. In the end he accepted a retroactive raise to his major-league minimum contract for 1976, hiking it from $19,000 to $30,000, and received a three-year contact starting at $50,000 for 1977.While the contract put his mind at ease — “Now I can concentrate on playing baseball,” Fidrych declared — many felt he could have demanded far more money.12 Early in the 1977 season, Fidrych appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. He was among the first athletes to appear on the cover of the magazine (after Muhammad Ali and Mark Spitz), which was then a countercultural and rock-and-roll institution. The article in the magazine described him as having a style that is “singular in baseball, a game which, in any case, doesn’t place great value on singular style.” The article also describes Fidrych as “the embodiment of rock & roll” in baseball.13

During spring training to start the 1977 season, Fidrych injured his knee while shagging flies. He had surgery on the knee and was able to return to the mound on May 27.When he did return, there was great fanfare, including a cover story in Sports Illustrated and a crowd of 44,027 on hand for his first start of the season at Tiger Stadium.14 Although he lost his first two starts of the season, he was as dominant as he had been in 1976, winning six straight games from June 6 to June 29. He pitched complete games in seven of his eight starts. Then, in a game against the Baltimore Orioles on July 4, he felt his arm go dead as he gave up six runs in 5⅔ innings. His arm, and his pitching, would never be the same. He made two more starts, but did not finish the first inning of his final start of the season, on July 12.

In 1978 Fidrych came back to start the season and pitched an Opening Day complete-game win. He followed that with another complete-game win. But by the time he appeared again on the April 24 cover of Sports Illustrated, he had made his third and last start of the season. Still he persisted, making four starts in 1979, but posting an ERA of 10.43. He was limited to nine starts in 1980. He did win his final major-league start, the last game of the 1980 season.

Fidrych even returned to the minors for portions of the 1980 season and all of 1981. After the 1981 campaign he was released by the Tigers but was signed by the Red Sox. He continued to try to return to the majors, pitching in the minors for the Pawtucket Red Sox in 1982 and 1983. But his pinpoint control was gone and he walked far more batters than he struck out. He finally retired from baseball on June 29, 1983, at the age of 28. An article in The Sporting News said Fidrych tried everything short of surgery in an attempt to find a solution to the recurring tightness in his shoulder.15 In 1985 Fidrych went to see Dr. James Andrews, who diagnosed him with a torn rotator cuff and successfully operated to repair his shoulder. However, it was too late for a comeback.

It is easy to speculate what brought about Fidrych’s career-ending injury. The knee injury before the 1977 season may have precipitated a change in his pitching motion which in turn may have caused the tear in his rotator cuff. There is certainly no question that he threw a high percentage of complete games in his starts. In the period 1976-1978, Fidrych threw complete games in 77 percent (33 of 43) of his starts. Although pitch counts for his starts were not recorded, the number of batters he faced can be calculated. In 1976 Fidrych faced 34 or more batters in 17 of his starts. Given an approximate average of 3.5 pitches per batter faced, Fidrych, at age 21 with one full season in the minors behind him, was likely throwing more than 120 pitches in most of the games he pitched. In one game he faced 47 batters, which meant that he threw approximately 165 pitches. Regardless of the cause, Fidrych’s career was cut severely short by his injury.

Fidrych went back home to Northboro, Massachusetts, where he became a licensed commercial truck driver and later purchased a farm. He married his wife, Ann, in 1986, and they had a daughter, Jessica.16 He made appearances for charity groups and nonprofit organizations over the years, making himself rather accessible to fans who fondly remembered the career of the Bird. Tragically, Fidrych died on April 13, 2009, at age 54, in an accident as he worked underneath a truck.

Both before and after his death, Fidrych remained in the consciousness of America. He was the inspiration behind, among other things, a coloring book on his career;17 a unique autobiography, titled No Big Deal, that he co-authored after the 1976 season;18 a poem by his biographer, Tom Clark;19 an independent film, Dear Mr. Fidrych, written and directed by Mike Cramer, a lawyer from Chicago;20 and the song “1976” by the band the Baseball Project.21 Each of these works reflects the exuberance, idealism, innocence, humility, and greatness found in the career and life of Mark Fidrych.

Fidrych and fellow pitcher Al Hrabosky played bit parts in the 1985 movie The Slugger’s Wife, which — although written by the acclaimed playwright Neil Simon — was panned critically.22 Fidrych played a much greater role in the movie from 2009, Dear Mr. Fidrych. As one might assume from the title, this film was greatly inspired by Fidrych and features him primarily as an unseen character, but also includes him playing himself for a brief but significant segment. The storyline follows a boy, Marty Jones, from the Detroit suburbs who comes to love Fidrych in 1976 and mails him a poem. Fidrych writes back, inspiring the youthful baseball career of the boy. The movie then moves forward 30 years, with Marty now going through something of a midlife crisis and embarking on a road trip with his son. At the suggestion of his son they decide to travel to Massachusetts and try to meet Fidrych. They arrive at Fidrych’s farm, meet the father’s boyhood hero, who is generous with his time and wisdom, and even play catch with him. While the movie was a low-budget ($30,000) dream project of its creator, with himself and his family playing the leading roles, it has a big heart, much like Fidrych himself.23 Fidrych died weeks before the movie was first screened.

After his playing career ended, Fidrych was never bitter about his shortened career. He always referred to himself as “lucky,” saying, “I got a family, I got a house, I got a dog. I would have liked my career to have been longer, but you can’t look back.”24

An updated version of this biography appeared in “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors“ (SABR, 2018), edited by Rob Edelman and Bill Nowlin.

Notes

1 Mark Fidrych and Tom Clark, No Big Deal (New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1977), 82-83.

2All playing statistics were accessed at baseball-reference.com.

3 Bill James and Rob Neyer, The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 203.

4 Bill James, 1977 Baseball Abstract (self-published, 1977), 37.

5 Jim Hawkins, “The Bird Amuses Tigers, Befuddles Enemy Swingers,” The Sporting News, June 5, 1976: 8.

6 Jim Benagh and Jim Hawkins, Go Bird Go! (New York: Dell Publishing, 1976), 142.

7 Pat Calabria, “Yanks Object to a Presentation,” Newsday, June 29, 1976: np.

8 Ernie Harwell, “Mark Fidrych,” in Danny Peary, ed., Cult Baseball Players (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 323-327.

9 Calabria.

10 Thomas Rogers, “Rookie Hurls 7-Hitter for 8-1 Record,” New York Times, June 29, 1976: 37-38.

11 Lowell Reidenbaugh, “Insult Added to Injury: AL’s Sad All-Star Fate,” The Sporting News, July 31, 1976: 5.

12 Jim Hawkins, “Bird a Tabby Cat at Contract Table,” The Sporting News, October 30, 1977: 20.

13 Dave Marsh, “The Tale of the Bird,” Rolling Stone, May 5, 1977: 42-47.

14 Peter Gammons, “The Bird Flaps Again and Doesn’t Flop,” Sports Illustrated, June 6, 1977: 20-21.

15 “Fidrych, Facing Cut, Chooses Retirement,” The Sporting News, July 11, 1983: 45.

16 Bryan Marquard, “Mark ‘The Bird’ Fidrych, 54; Pitcher Enthralled Fans,” Boston Globe, April 14, 2009: B14.

17 Rosemary Lonborg and Diane Houghton, The Bird of Baseball: The Story of Mark Fidrych, A Coloring Book (Northboro, Massachusetts: Fidco Distributors, 1996).

18 Fidrych and Clark.

19 The poem can be found in Richard Grossinger and Lisa Conrad, eds., Baseball I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life, Fifth Edition (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 1992), 90.

20Dear Mr. Fidrych, An Independent Film by Mike Cramer, Monkeydog Media LLC, 2009.

21 The Baseball Project, “1976,” (written by Steve Wynn), Volume 2: High and Inside, Yep Roc Records, 2011.

22 One such critical review can be found at: rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sluggers-wife-1985, accessed January 2, 2017.

23 Phone interview with Mike Cramer by Richard J. Puerzer, January 25, 2012.

24 Marquard.