The Pecan Park Eagle

One of my favorite people anywhere, Bobby Bragan, turned 92 years young back on October 30th. I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to acknowledge the fact here in this blog because the man is truly amazing and deserving of all the recognition we can give him.

Number One: The man is all heart. Since 1992, his Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation has raised over $900,000 i support of 367 deserving students. It just gets stronger over time – and that’s just another reason it’s aptly named. It came  into being at a time in the life of its founder when he would have been more than justified in hanging up his charitable ventures and just moved over to take it easy with his music and other personal entertainments.

Not so Bobby Bragan. He loves kids and wanted to do something material to help those young people who needed a little extra support getting down the road with positive life goals.

Bobby was a feisty infielder-catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers (1943-44, 47-48) Dodgers after starting his big league career with those awful Philadelphia Phillies teams of 1940-42. He managed the Fort Worth Cats to a couple of first place finishes in the Texas League in 1948 and 1949. Those clubs won the playoff pennant in ’48 and then lost in seven in ’49, setting the stage for Bragan’s ascent to his big league mentoring jobs at Pittsburgh (1956-57), Cleveland (1958), Milwaukee (1963-65), and Atlanta (1966). Bobby also managed at Hollywood during the early 1950s and was also one the original coaching/scouting people for the Houston Colt .45 team when it came into being in 1962.

Bragan was always a run-and-gun manager who didn’t mind mixing it up with the umpires when he felt they had erred in their vision of what was going on in the game. As a result, he was also no stranger to the early shower directives that often result from these expressions of a different viewpoint from the game arbiters.

One of my favorite Bragan stories is about the time he followed Birdie Tebbetts as manager of the Milwaukee Braves in 1963. It seems that Tebbetts had left him with two sealed envelopes, duly marked as “No. 1” and “No. 2”, and each bearing the caution: “Open only in case of crisis.”

After a little more than a year at the helm, Bragan and the ’64 Braves got off to a bad start. Everyone was screaming for Bobby’s head. He decided it was time to open that first envelope from former manager Tebbetts.

The note said: “Blame it on me and the old guys! – Birdie Tebbetts”

Bragan went to the front office and laid it out his way. “You’ve saddled me with an old Adcock, Logan, Bruton, and Burdette,” Bobby protested. “Birdie left me with a terrible team. I can’t win with these old guys here. Get me younger players.”

Bragan weathered the storm when the team improved enough to take the heat off him as manager, but a couple of years later, when the team really hoped to make good during their first season as new 1966 Atlanta Braves, they again began to struggle in the tank. This time the front office, the media, and the fans wanted Bobby’s head in no certain terms.

Bobby decided it was time to check out Birdie Tebbetts second envelope. He went to his desk, pulled it out, ttore it open, and quickly read its very brief message:

“Prepare two more envelopes,” the message read.

112 games into the 1966 season, Bobby Bragan was fired as manager of the Atlanta Braves. He left with a mark of 52 wins, 59 losses, and 1 tie.

Like the Energizer Bunny, Bobby Bragan never stay fired for long. Today he keeps on going and going – and leaving his mark of goodness on everything he touches.

Belated Happy Birthday No. 92, Bobby Bragan! And keep on truckin’, my friend!

So sad. Family found the body in the early afternoon of the same day. Once again, the talented and colorful young man who set the baseball world on its ear during his 1976 rookie season as a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers had left the scene too soon. Far too soon.

Selected in the 10th round of the 1974 amateur draft by the Detroit Tigers, Fidrych quickly found the roster of the big league club, winning 19, losing 9, and posting a 2.34 ERA to boot. More than games alone, Mark won the hearts and imagination of baseball fans everywhere by his fresh and unorthodox physical approach to the art of pitching. People thought he was talking to the baseballs as he prepared to throw them. It was actually an exercise in focus upon the job at hand. If he was speaking to anyone, Mark was actually speaking to himself along these lines: “Be here now fully in this moment. Give this pitch your very best shot. Visualize in you mind the outcome of this pitch as an easy out.” The young pitcher really subscribed to the belief that we cannot accomplish any goal we cannot actually see ourselves reaching. While he was meditating, a lot of people thought Mark Fidrych was simply being superstitious. They were wrong.

Fidrych did like to get down on the ground prior to games and hand prune tiny rocks and paper trash out of the soil before he worked. He also tended to abandon and mistreat baseballs that hitters converted into hits from his pitches. More than once, he asked umpires to take balls out of play that  had been struck for hits. He wanted the umpires to place these errant balls in the company of balls that knew how to behave as outs once they left a pitcher’s hand. So, there’s no denying that Mr. Fidrych came wrapped with his own flavor of special eccentricity.

The sad elements of the Mark Fidrych story are the things that took him out of baseball – and eventually out of life. In both instances, these things happened as Mark simply went about the business of  being himself.

Mark Fidrych got his "Bird" nickname from Big Bird himself!

Mark Fidrych’s future in baseball looked wide and deep as he went to spring training in the the spring of 1977. Unfortunately, while clowning around in the outfield, Mark tore some cartilage in his knee and was forced out of action for a short period. When he came back to work, he pitched fine, but about six weeks after his return, in a game against Baltimore, Mark said he suddenly just felt his right throwing arm simply “go dead.”

Mark had torn a rotator cuff, but it wasn’t diagnosed as such until 1985, eight years later, and five years beyond his forced retirement from baseball  at age 29 in 1980.

Mark Fidrych was only 10-10 over those last four post-injury seasons (1977-80) and he retired with very incomplete information about the cause of his lost skill and effectiveness. Still, he handled the end of his career well, but probably never fully appreciating the extent of the enthusiasm that his personal style had pumped back into the game. Baseball even gives Fidrych credit today for pumping several additional millions into the gate during his 1976 hay-day.

Then he goes out and gets killed by a sick truck that wasn’t  jacked up properly. What a waste.

Too bad Mark Fidrych couldn’t have hung around longer. In baseball. And in life.

When Bernard Malamud wrote about baseball phenom Roy Hobbs getting shot by a mysterious woman in black in his novel “The Natural,” he was doing what a lot of writers do for the sake of art. He was drawing from real life. Oh, there never was a real Roy Hobbs, just a lot of young guys who may have looked like him or Robert Redford on the field, but even they were all lost in a barrel with the one guy who really was him on the diamond, a fellow named Mickey Mantle, but even ladies man Mickey somehow always dodged the bullet. We likely will never know how close that guys like Mantle or Ruth ever came to suffering in reality the artful Hobbsian fate.

First baseman Eddie Waitkus of the Philadelphia Phillies and a disturbed young woman from Chicago named Ruth Ann Steinhagen were another story. On June 14, 1949, Waitkus and Steinhagen spent no more than five minutes of their lives together in a Chicago hotel room, but that shared time almost turned out to be the last five minutes in Eddie’s life – and definitely enough stuff to later make up a baseball story dream launcher for writer Malamud.

Here’s how it happened.

Ruth Ann Steinhagen grew up a troubled young girl In Chicago. In 1946, at age 16, she went to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field with her girl friend and the latter’s boy friend. She became fixated on Eddie Waitkus at this game. Waitkus was then the Cubs’ first baseman and he was having a pretty good year at the plate, but that didn’t really matter. Steinhagen thought he was cute.

Ruth Steinhagen started an intense scrapbook on Eddie Waitkus, documenting his every achievement and printed picture as religiously as later generations of young girls would similarly record and celebrate the lives of certain rock stars. Ruth still had major issues with her self esteem and was episodically involved in psychiatric therapy during her adolescence. She doesn’t appear to have ever experienced an actual relationship with any male as a boy friend during this early period of life.

When Eddie Waitkus was traded by the Cubs to the Phillies on December 14, 1948, Ruth Ann cried and said she didn’t want to live. She went through a very shaky period, but finally decided she needed to see Eddie Waitkus and let him know that she wanted to be his girl friend. It was a very psychotic idea. I rather doubt she shared it with anyone in any position to stop her back then. Even in 1948, it would have raised red flags among the psychiatrically trained. Even then, mental health experts knew that patients who are suicidal over psychotically perceived  losses are equally capable of turning around their self-destructive thoughts and converting them into thoughts of harming the perceived cause of loss and pain.

In this case, Eddie Waitkus was perceived as the one to blame for the pain of Ruth Ann Steinhagen. It was all Eddie’s fault, in her mind, and he didn’t even know the girl.

In May 1949, now 19 and an attractive young woman, Ruth Ann Steinhagen took out a two-day room reservation at the Edgewater Beach Hotel on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, where Waitkus and the Phillies would also be staying during a series with the Cubs.

Ruth Ann also invited a friend, Helen Farazis, over to the hotel on her first night  there, June 13th. Ruth told Helen that she had a a gun and that her real intentions in being there were to shoot Eddie Waitkus. Helen did not believe Ruth Ann, nor did she tell anyone else about what seemed like a joking threat.

The next day day, June 14, 1949, Ruth Ann went to Wrigley Field and watched Eddie Waitkus and the Phillies beat up on the Cubs, 9-2. She then went back to her hotel room after the game and ordered three drinks from room service. When the bellboy arrived, she gave him five dollars and told him to take a written message to Eddie Waitkus. The note read as follows:

““It is extremely important that I see you as soon as possible.  We are not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about.  I think it would be to your advantage to let me explain this to you as I am leaving the hotel the day after tomorrow.  I realize this is out of the ordinary, but as I say, it is extremely important.”

Steinhagem signed the note “Ruth Ann Burns” and the bellboy left in the room that was shared by Waitkus with teammate Russ Meyer. (Here’s the story gets a little tricky, almost as though a Hollywood scriptwriter or Barnard Malamud had come up with the gimmick on a cup of coffee and five or six cigarettes!)

Meyer came  back to the room first. He found  the note inviting Waitkus to join Ruth in Room 1297. Meyer assumed the note was from a real girl friend of Eddie, a woman named Ruth Martin. When Waitkus then arrived, Meyer just told him that Ruth was waiting for him in Room 1297. Eddie went on up to the noted room, all the while thinking it was an invitation from his real friend.

When Eddie arrived at Room 1297, he asked for his friend, Ruth Martin. Ruth Ann Steinhagen simply introduced herself as a friend of Martin’s and explained that she had stepped out for a minute. She invited Eddie into the room for a short wait for Ruth Martin. Eddie suspected nothing and accepted. He stepped into the room and took a seat.

As Eddie was seating himself, Ruth Ann walked straight to the closet and pulled out a loaded .22 rifle. She took aim at Eddie Waitkus and pulled the trigger, hitting him once in the chest under the heart. As she did so, she yelled the most famous words ever expressed by most people in cases of relationship “love” violence: “If I can’t have you, nobody can!”

The bullet lodged in the muscles near the spine as Eddie Waitkus’s right lung collapsed. Ruth Ann Steinhagen then calmly called the front desk and told them that had just shot a man in Room 1297. Had she not placed the call immediately, it is likely that Eddie Waitkus would have bled to death.

Eddie Waitkus recovered physically and went on to highlight  his career as a member of the 1950 Phillies Whiz Kids champions, finishing in 1955 with a lifetime batting average of .285. Eddie passed away from cancer at age 53 on September 15, 1972.

Ruth Ann Steinhagen was found innocent by reason of  insanity and committed for psychiatric treatment of schizophrenia and therapy that included a long period of hospitalization and shock therapy. On April 17, 1952, less than three years after the shooting, Ruth Ann Steinhagen was declared sane and released.  The charge of assault with intent to kill was dropped. She and Eddie never saw each other again.

Years later, Eddie Waitkus looked back on his near fatal encounter with the psychotic Ms. Steinhagen and remarked, ““She had the coldest-looking face that I ever saw.”

You bet she did, Eddie. It was cold steel cold.