September 9, 1939: Dodgers’ Chris Hartje delivers off the bench in major-league debut

Chris Hartje got his first taste of the major leagues as the Brooklyn Dodgers’ backup catcher during the final weeks of the 1939 campaign. In his major-league debut, he delivered as a pinch-hitter in what would prove to be the high point of his brief big-league tenure. Seven years later, Hartje was attempting to reignite his baseball career as a member of the minor-league Spokane Indians when his life took a tragic turn.

After six seasons in the bottom half of the National League standings, the ’39 Dodgers were vastly improved under first-year player-manager Leo Durocher. Entering a two-game weekend series with the New York Giants on September 9, the Dodgers had won five of six and owned a record of 67-60, good for fourth place in the senior circuit. Though the Giants trailed Brooklyn by only a game in the standings, they were having a relatively poor season by their standards. After winning three pennants in the preceding six years, Bill Terry’s club was in fifth place with a 65-60 mark. Neither team had a realistic chance of catching the first-place Cincinnati Reds (77-49).

Terry sent Bill Lohrman (11-10, 3.47 ERA) to the mound while Durocher tapped Hugh Casey (11-8, 2.75) for the Saturday afternoon series opener in front of an Ebbets Field crowd of 15,559. Casey entered the game with wins in each of his five previous starts, a stretch that included a pair of complete-game victories over these very same Giants. His job was made easier this time by the absence of five-time NL home-run king Mel Ott, who had been hampered by charley horses for several weeks.1 The Dodgers lineup was anchored by slugging first baseman Dolph Camilli, who entered the game with a .277 batting average, 24 home runs, and a .917 OPS.

Al Todd had assumed the regular catching duties for the Dodgers two weeks earlier after Babe Phelps suffered a season-ending hand fracture. Brooklyn’s new second-string catcher, Hartje, had yet to see action since being recalled from Montreal on September 6. The San Francisco native originally signed with the New York Yankees in 1934 and had climbed as high as Double A in the Yankees chain but was traded to the Dodgers before the 1939 season.

Hartje got in Durocher’s doghouse during spring training because of a perceived lack of hustle. “It’s all right with me if you want to stay in the minors and work for peanut money,” Durocher told him.2 Hartje hit .296 in Montreal and now awaited his chance to get back in the skipper’s good graces.

The Giants got on the board early against Casey. In the top of the first, Jo-Jo Moore and Frank Demaree delivered consecutive one-out singles with Demaree advancing to second on the throw to third, putting two runners in scoring position for Bob Seeds, the Giants’ cleanup man. Seeds drove home Moore with a grounder to second and reached safely when Camilli failed to handle the throw from Pete Coscarart. Casey escaped further damage by inducing an inning-ending double play off the bat of catcher Harry Danning.

The Giants added a second run in the top of the fourth on a leadoff home run by Danning—his career-high 15th blast of the season. Lohrman, meanwhile, navigated around baserunners in each of the first five frames, including a leadoff fourth-inning double by Camilli, but emerged each time unscored on.

The Dodgers finally broke through in the sixth when Camilli hit a 400-foot triple off the center-field wall and scored on Jimmy Ripple’s single to right.3 Ripple had been acquired from the Giants just two days earlier in a waiver-exchange deal for catcher Ray Hayworth. Ripple, an outfielder, was mired in a 2-for-21 slump that dipped his average to .228 at the time of the trade, but he had made a splash in his Dodgers debut a day earlier, going 4-for-7 with four RBIs in a doubleheader sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies.

The score remained 2-1 in favor of the Giants until the top of the eighth. With Casey still on the mound, Demaree doubled to start the inning and was sacrificed to third by Seeds. After Danning grounded out, Johnny McCarthy plated the Giants’ third run with a double down the right-field line.

Lohrman, perhaps tiring, walked Dixie Walker and Camilli to start the home half of the eighth. Terry went to his bullpen and called on lanky 6-foot-5 southpaw Cliff Melton (11-12, 3.72), who four days earlier had shut out the Phillies. Now he was called on to get the final six outs in relief of Lohrman. The first man Melton faced was Ripple, who squared to bunt in an obvious sacrifice situation. Melton fell behind with three consecutive balls out of the strike zone. Ripple got the green light on 3-and-0 and bounced a single past the drawn-in infield, scoring Walker and advancing Camilli to third.

The lefty-hitting Art Parks, who had pinch-hit for Ernie Koy in the sixth inning, was due up next. Durocher went to his bench and sent the right-hand-swinging Hartje up to hit for Parks. On Melton’s second pitch to him, Hartje pulled the ball down the third-base line for a base hit. Camilli and Ripple raced home, putting Brooklyn ahead, 4-3. Hartje advanced to third on Billy Jurges’s errant relay to the plate and was credited with a double. Roscoe McGowen of the New York Times wrote that Hartje’s hit “put the crowd in a state bordering on hysteria.”4

The Dodgers added another run when Todd singled Hartje home and advanced to third on Johnny Hudson’s double off the right-field wall. Casey helped his own cause with a fly ball to center field that scored Todd, making it 6-3. The struggling Melton then allowed a single to Coscarart, wild-pitched Hudson home, and ceded an RBI double to Cookie Lavagetto. By the time the inning ended, the Dodgers had sent 12 men to the plate, scored seven runs, and held an 8-3 advantage.

Casey retired the Giants in order in the top of the ninth, including a gimpy Ott, who pinch-hit for Melton. The win was Casey’s sixth in a row. He would finish the season with nine wins in his final 11 decisions.

The Dodgers were unfazed by playing 21 of their remaining 25 games on the road. They went 16-9 the rest of the way and finished the season in third place with an 84-69 mark, 12½ games behind Cincinnati. The Giants played out the stretch a game under .500 and finished in fifth. The two franchises were heading in opposite directions. The Dodgers climbed to second place in 1940 and won the pennant in 1941, the first of three in the decade. The Giants, on the other hand, finished in the National League’s second division eight of the next 10 seasons. 

Hartje’s time in Brooklyn—and the major leagues—proved to be short-lived. He appeared in nine games that September, including five starts as a catcher, and recorded five hits in 16 at-bats. He spent the next three seasons in the International League with the Montreal Royals and Syracuse Chiefs.

After serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, Hartje attempted to jump-start his baseball career. A spring tryout with Casey Stengel’s Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League in the spring of 1946 failed to land a gig, so Hartje signed with the Spokane Indians of the Class-B Western International League that June. He had been with the team five days and appeared in three games when the team bus drove off the road in the Cascade Mountains and tumbled down a steep ravine. Nine of the 15 players on board died, including Hartje, who succumbed to his injuries two days after the crash. It remains to this day the deadliest tragedy in the history of American professional sports.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Joseph Wancho and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Trading Card Database.

Sources  

In addition to the sources mentioned in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com, Retrosheet.org and SABR.org.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BRO/BRO193909090.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1939/B09090BRO1939.htm

Notes

1 Harry Forbes, “Giants Buy Witek, Newark Infielder,” New York Daily News, September 2, 1939: 189.

2 Harold Parrott, “Basque Second Sacker No Longer Tabbed as ‘Nice-Nelly’ Ball Player,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 15, 1939: 18.

3 Roscoe McGowen, “Dodgers’ 7 in 8th Crush Giants, 8-3; Melton Hit Hard,” New York Times, September 10, 1939: 130.

4 “Dodgers’ 7 in 8th Crush Giants, 8-3; Melton Hit Hard.”