Regarding Roy Campanella, I asked yesterday whether any big league catcher ever had a better year with the bat than he did in the 1953 season, when he hit for a .312 average, with 41 homers, 142 RBI, 103 runs scored, and an OPS of 1.006. Since he played in about a thousand World Series games against crosstown rival Yogi Berra, it occurred to me to look up Yogi's best year and compare: exact contemporaries, both Hall of Famers at the same position, so seems a worthwhile exercise. Turns out that Yogi wasn't far behind. I think his best year was probably 1950, the season he turned 25. (Campanella was 25 when Jackie Robinson broke the color line and so, at the same age, had not yet played in a major league game.) In the 1950 season, Yogi batted .322, with 28 homers, 124 RBI, 116 runs scored, and an OPS of .915. Pretty similar! Here's something that leaps out at you: Yogi struck out 12 times during the 1950 season. I typed that carefully, it's not a mistake. He came to bat 656 times and 12 of them resulted in a strikeout. Played every day and struck out twice a month.
Like Campanella, Yogi was a three-time league MVP. Probably should have been at least four—his teammate, Phil Rizzuto, won the award in that 1950 season. Rizzuto had a good year—batted .324 and scored 125 runs for the pennant winning Yankees—but who did the writers think was always driving in the little banjo hitter? "Well, Rizzuto played shortstop," people will say—like that's harder than catcher! Yogi finished third in the 1950 balloting. The next year he won his first MVP award. The year after that he finished fourth. The year after that he was second. Then he won the award two years in a row. Then he finished second again. It helped that the Yankees were always winning the pennant but holy crap! Over the course of seven consecutive seasons, he never finished below fourth in the MVP voting while winning the award three times. It's kind of a shame that a lot of people think of him as a baseball clown because he was actually one of the very greatest players, ever.
Someone asked me about Campanella's ethnic heritage as the picture I attached to my post about him makes it look as if he could have passed for white. His mother was African American and his father as Italian as Joe DiMaggio—thus, "Campanella." I don't know what the rules were—if there were rules—about how black you had to be before you had to play in the Negro leagues, not the major leagues. I do know that in college, in a class on American history, I had a young African American instructor. She was young back then, she'd be pushing 80 now if she's survived. Anyway, she was lecturing one day about how in the Jim Crow South the officious bigots had established an elaborate system of rules determining how much black blood you needed before you had to drink from this fountain, not that one, etc. One Black parent was obviously enough. What if one parent was three-eighths and the other white? It got complicated. The African American community, she said, had a saying to help strip away the complexity and keep things simple. The saying was, "A little dab'll do ya."
Comments