Recent Baseball Passings, 2005

[Guest Edgy DC]

Gene Mauch, 79.

[Frayed Knot]

I kinda lost track of Mauch somewhere along the way
I either would have guessed that he was already dead or, if living, pushing 90-something.

He seems to occupy a spot from long ago in the way back machine even though he was still managing in the late '80s.

[MFS62]

He was known for running his pitching staff into the ground in the failed attempt to win a pennant in 1964. But he was one of the best in-game managers of his era. He was always willing to do something different.
One example: When Jim Bunning was on the Pirates, the Phillies couldn't buy a run off him. He would consistently pitch well against them.
One day, Mauch had the first four batters bunt for hits against him. Bunning was so shocked by seeing the bases loaded and a run in that he grooved one to the next batter. From that game on, the Phillies handled him pretty well. Mauch had gotten inside his head and taken him out of his comfort zone.

Later

[Theoldmole]

Wonder if this says anything about Bunning as a senator.

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

I don't recall if we acknowledged the passing of Mickey Owen anywhere in this forum.

[Guest Edgy DC]

Didn't know he did pass. Do you have an obit to link to?

[Frayed Knot]

Yeah, it was about a month ago that he passed like a pitch in the World Seri ...

oh never mind.

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

I found this on the San Francisco Chronicle's web site, although it's from the New York Times.


MICKEY OWEN: 1916-2005
Series goof didn't haunt catcher
Richard Goldstein, New York Times
Sunday, July 17, 2005

Mickey Owen maintained that he was not bothered by the barbs over his famous World Series miscue. As he put it long afterward, "I would've been completely forgotten if I hadn't missed that pitch."

Owen, the Brooklyn Dodger catcher remembered for a misadventure in the 1941 World Series that propelled the Yankees to the championship and overshadowed his All-Star career, died Wednesday at a nursing home in Mount Vernon, Mo. He was 89.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, his son, Charles, said.

Owen played for 13 seasons in the major leagues and was an outstanding catcher with a strong, accurate arm. But he has been linked in baseball history with figures like Fred Merkle, Ralph Branca and Bill Buckner, all outstanding players defined by a single moment of misfortune.

On the afternoon of Oct. 5, 1941, the Yankees were trailing the Dodgers, 4-3, at Ebbets Field in Game 4 of the World Series and were down to their final out with Brooklyn about to tie the Series at two games apiece. Tommy Henrich, the Yankees' star outfielder, was at the plate facing the ace reliever Hugh Casey, with nobody on base and a full count.

Casey threw a pitch that broke sharply, and Henrich swung and missed. The home-plate umpire, Larry Goetz, signaled a strikeout and the game was seemingly over.

But the pitch hit the heel of Owen's glove and skipped away for a passed ball. As Owen chased the ball near the Dodgers' dugout, Henrich raced to first base. Joe DiMaggio followed with a single to left, then Charlie Keller hit a ball high off the right-field screen, scoring Henrich and DiMaggio and giving the Yankees a 5-4 lead.

After Bill Dickey walked, Joe Gordon doubled to make the score 7-4. The Dodgers went down quickly in the ninth, and the Yankees had a lead of three games to one. They captured the World Series the next day, inspiring the enduring headline in The Brooklyn Eagle, "Wait Till Next Year."

Vindication was a long time coming for the Dodgers, who lost to the Yankees four more times in the World Series before defeating them in 1955 for their only championship in Brooklyn.

Owen dismissed speculation that Casey's fateful delivery was a spitball.

"Casey had two kinds of curveballs," he told Dave Anderson of The New York Times in 1988. "One was an overhand curve that broke big. The other one was like a slider, it broke sharp and quick. But we had the same sign for either one. He just threw whichever one was working best. When we got to 3 and 2 on Tommy, I called for the curveball. I was looking for the quick curve he had been throwing all along. But he threw the overhand curve, and it really broke big, in and down. Tommy missed it by six inches."

As Henrich remembered the moment: "As soon as I missed it, I looked around to see where the ball was. It fooled me so much, I figured maybe it fooled Mickey, too. And it did."

Owen feared he would be a pariah for Brooklyn fans, but he was evidently forgiven. "I got about 4,000 wires and letters," he told W.C. Heinz in The Saturday Evening Post on the 25th anniversary of the passed ball. "I had offers of jobs and proposals of marriage. Some girls sent their pictures in bathing suits, and my wife tore them up."

Arnold Malcolm Owen, a native of Nixa, Mo., made his major league debut with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1937 and was traded to the Dodgers before the 1941 season. He handled 476 consecutive chances without an error in 1941, setting a single-season National League record for catchers, and he was an All- Star for four consecutive years before entering the Navy early in 1945.

After leaving military service, Owen jumped to the Mexican League in 1946 and was among more than a dozen major leaguers suspended from organized baseball until 1949 for doing so. He later played for the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox and had a career batting average of .255.

After his playing days, he founded the Mickey Owen Baseball School in Miller, Mo., and served as sheriff of Greene County in Missouri.

[MFS62]

Negro League player.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2005-08-11-radcliffe-obit_x.htm

Later

[soupcan]

He doesn't rate a name MFS?

Why didn't you just write 'old black guy dies'?

[Willets Point]

"Double Duty" Radcliffe, what a great nickname!

I wonder who takes the title of oldest living baseball player now?

[Guest Edgy DC]

Double Duty rocked.

It's not everybody who can tell a player that they're no Chief Bender.

[Willets Point]

A name...and a face to go with the name.


Playing days


Later days.

[seawolf17]

At 96, he threw one pitch for the Schaumberg Flyers in the Northern League. Man, that must be one crazy league.

[MFS62]

Friends of mine heard him speak at a Washinbgton DC baseball dinner a few years ago, and said he was a great story teller. His mind was still good.

Later

[Guest Edgy DC]

One of the Mauch memories had Jerry Grote leaning over the Phillies dugout to make a catch and missing it when Mauch --- legally, but unsportingly --- swatted at his glove.

[Guest Edgy DC]

Joe Bauman, 83, Who Hit 72 Homers as Minor Leaguer, Dies

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: September 22, 2005

Joe Bauman, who hit 72 home runs in 1954 playing for a minor league team in Roswell, N.M., setting a single-season record for professional baseball that stood for nearly half a century, died Tuesday at a hospital in Roswell. He was 83.
The cause was pneumonia, which developed after he incurred a broken pelvis in a fall last month at a ceremony naming a Roswell ballpark for him, his sister-in-law, Mary Ramsey, said.

He was a career minor leaguer who never envisioned reaching the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, figuring he would make out just fine running a gas station in the years to come. But at age 32, Bauman, a 6-foot-4, 235-pound, left-handed-hitting first baseman, produced one of the most spectacular seasons at the plate in baseball history. He became the biggest celebrity in Roswell since aliens supposedly emerged from a flying saucer near the town in 1947, spawning an enduring saga of American pop culture.

Appearing in 138 games for the 1954 Roswell Rockets of the Class C Longhorn League, one rung above the minors' lowest level then, Bauman not only hit 72 homers but also batted .400, drove in 224 runs and drew 150 walks.

Playing home games at Roswell's Park Field, Bauman took aim at a 10-foot-high right-field fence, 329 feet down the line, driving baseballs into a rodeo grounds when he wasn't pumping gas at Joe Bauman's Texaco Service in town.

His single-season home-run record for all of organized baseball endured until Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs for the San Francisco Giants in 2001. "I never thought it'd last this long," The Associated Press quoted Bauman as saying then. "I was watching on TV when Barry Bonds hit that last one. It didn't bother me or anything. I just thought, 'There goes my record.' "

Bauman, who grew up in Oklahoma City, made his minor league debut in 1941. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he alternated between the minors and semipro ball and played for a time in the Boston Braves' organization.

"There was thousands of minor leaguers then," Bauman once told The Los Angeles Times, "and we knew most of us would never get to the big leagues. Some were bitter, some were philosophical and accepted it, using the minor leagues to get into doors that might have been closed otherwise."

Bauman retired during the 1956 season, having hit 337 home runs in his nine-year minor league career, spent mostly in low-level leagues. He settled in Roswell, running his gas station and serving as a manager for a beer distributorship.

He is survived by his wife, Dorothy.

"It was easy to hit balls out here, in a sense," Bauman told Bart Ripp in recalling his 72-home-run season in the 1980 journal of the Society for American Baseball Research. "The ball carries so good here. Plus, we got a free ham for every home run. We had the best-fed ball club in the country."

[Willets Point]

I bet that homer record was alien-aided.

[Guest Edgy DC]

Bill James wrote a lot about that guy. That whole team was full of powermongers.

[Zvon]

Willets Point wrote: I bet that homer record was alien-aided.

HA!.
So you watched The X Files too,lol.

That was such a great episode.

[Guest Edgy DC]

Former all-star outfielder Pat Kelly, 61, who played for five teams during a 15-year major-league career, died Sunday of a heart attack.

The Philadelphia native was selected to play in the 1973 All-Star Game during a season in which he hit .280 in a career-high 144 games with the Chicago White Sox. He played for the Baltimore Orioles in the 1979 World Series.

He also played for Minnesota, Kansas City and Cleveland.

Mr. Kelly was a minister for Lifeline Ministries in Maryland after his retirement.

[Valadius]

They said that this was said between Kelly and Earl Weaver:

Kelly: Don't you want me to walk with God?

Weaver: I'd rather you walk with the bases loaded.

[MFS62]

from rotoworld:

Mario Encarnacion, a former major leaguer who had been playing in China, was found dead Monday morning in his dormitory.
The cause of death is not yet known, but investigators said his room had not been broken into and that a post-mortem examination found no signs of external injury. Encarnacion had suffered from gastroenteritis and he was suspended for a time by the Chinese Professional Baseball League last year after testing positive for steroids. Encarnacion, 30, was once a top prospect of the A's, and he played in the majors with the Rockies in 2001 and the Cubs in 2002

[Guest Edgy DC]

Damn, 30.

Coming up throught the A's system, Miguel Tejada described himself and the other prospects being in awe of Encarnacion, like he was a man playing among boys.

Turns out, he was in fact two years older than he claimed.

[Valadius]

They have a league in China?

I did not know that.

[Guest Edgy DC]

Melvin Mora played in China.

I think most westerners in the league play for franchises based in Hong Kong or Taiwan.

[Guest Edgy DC]

Ernest M. Bessette, former Met farmhand.

[MFS62]

Al Widmar also passed away on the weekend. Widmar spent almost 60 years in baseball. Imagine the stories Al could be telling over a cool one right now. I wonder if there are sports bars in Heaven?

http://toronto.bluejays.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/news/article.jsp?ymd=20051017&content_id=1253402&vkey=news_tor&fext=.jsp&c_id=tor
_________________


Later

[MFS62]

And Hal Lebovitz, long time writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

http://www.cleveland.com/newslogs/plaindealer/index.ssf?/mtlogs/cleve_plaindealer/archives/2005_10.html#088027

I remember when the Sporting News had a weekly article on each team by one of their beat writers. (Mole, you remember those times too?) Hal was the Cleveland regular contributor. I liked his articles.

Later

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

Ask the Ref.

I always assumed he was a referee.