Get Well, Ed Mierkowicz!
And an Early Happy 91st Birthday on March 6th, too!
Earlier today, our Houston Babies buddy and baseball history explorer colleague, Bob Blair, sent me a most heartwarming story about nearly 91-year old Ed Mierkowicz, a former almost career minor league outfielder and first baseman/outfielder. Ed’s not doing all that great on the health front these days, but his spirit and memories apparently have not been stilled for baseball, the game he loved and played for 13 seasons in the minors (1944-46, 1948-57) and 4 part-time service years in the majors with the Detroit Tigers (1945-48) and St. Louis Cardinals (1950).
Mierkowicz now bears the singular distinction of being the only surviving member of the 1945 World Series Detroit Tigers Championship Team. At age 21, Ed made his only brief appearance in ’45 Series as a bottom of the 9th left field substitute in Wrigley Field for the great Hank Greenberg. The Tigers held a 9-3 lead at the time. Manager Steve O’Neill had decided to give “the kid” of actual combat as the Michigan club prepared to wrap and celebrate their new crown.
“Mierkowicz! – Left field!” came the manager’s shout.
Mierkowicz responded in shock as though the call were routine. He grabbed his glove and trotted out to left field to walk and run in the big foot steps of the man he had just replaced.
“”What the hell am I doing here? My knees are shaking.” Ed Mierkowicz finally whispered quietly to himself amid the sight of distant figures moving around near home and the crowd buzzing with the sounds of disappointment in preparation.
Future Hall of Famer Hal Newhouser is on the mound, ready to bring home the bacon, but Roy Hughes of the Cubs lines a single to left, which Mierkowicz fields cleanly and throws back in. It turns out to be his only play of the day. Newhouser retires the next three Cubs in order: strike out, fly out, ground out. – Game. Set. Match. Tigers.
Mierkowicz joins his great senior mates in celebration and joy. He will always have the memory. Once upon a time, the kid from Wyandotte, Michigan got to live out for real the dream of every boy who grew up playing baseball in Michigan and the total sphere of fan commitment to the Detroit Tigers. – He got be an active part, regardless of how small it may have been, of helping the Tigers win the World Series.
Now Ed’s a very old man with a very young heart, living with the a small treasure trove of ancient, but realized major league dreams: He is the last living member of the 1945 World Series Championship team, as we previously mentioned. He only hit one big league homer, but it came off future great pitcher Ed Lopat, then of the White Sox. And he also vividly recalls the longest home run he ever hit as a minor leaguer.
“The longest home run I ever hit,” Mierkowicz said, “was for Milwaukee at Nashville in the minors. It went up, up, up. I never saw it come down.
“Sometimes I think it’s still going.”
(Funny you should put it that way, Ed. All of the miraculous homers of my imagination have always been like the one in your actual, or embellished, memory. They are all out there in orbit somewhere – still going – from here to infinity.)
A link to the wonderful story about Ed Mierkowitz by Tom Gage of the Detroit News that Bob Blair sent me is as follows. Read it. We think you will be glad you did:
“Now Here’s the Rest of the Story….”
Ed Mierkowicz, Age 28
Ht: 6’4″ – Wt: 205 lbs.
Batted Right; Threw Right
OF/1st Base
Houston Buffs, 1952
Bob Blair most probably didn’t this know this part when he sent me that link, but my memories of Ed Mierkowicz are a little more fan personal. In 1952, at age 28, Mierkowicz was assigned to the Houston Buffs by the parent club Cardinals as an outfielder/first baseman. Coming off a great 1951 season in which the Buffs were in the St. Louis rotating talent assignment wheel for a good year, the Buffs won the straightaway and playoff Texas League championship before falling to the Birmingham Barons in a six-game Dixie Series that they also “shoulda” won.
1952 was a deep six talent assignment year for the Buffs and – guess what? The same brilliant manager from 1951, Al Hollingsworth, couldn’t scrape together enough baseball savvy and people wisdom to coax the dismal Buffs up from their self-made grade as occupants of the 8th and last place position in the Texas League at season’s end.
In my 14-year old Knothole Gang member’s perspective and living memory, Ed Mierkowicz was one the bright stars in that mostly dark night year. As an outfielder and once in a while substitute at first base for my now deceased old hero and later life great friend, Jerry Witte, who was then playing his last year at age 36, Ed acquitted himself well at the plate and was no embarrassment in the field. He batted .271 in 538 times at bat as a ’52 Buff, collecting 28 doubles, 4 triples, and 11 home runs on the year – even though they most often were launched as shots fired in pursuit of an already lost cause.
As an all around player, “Mierk” was good in the AA Texas League in 1952. He had a great level swing and, as he recalls in the linked article from Detroit, he was a prototypical line drive hitter. When Ed did hit a homer for the Buffs, it most often left the playing field like a rife shot – leaving our company at an elevation point that was usually only inches to a few feet higher than the section of the outfield wall from which it was departing.
Thank you, Bob Blair, again – and this time for awakening this now fairly ancient Houston fan to the memory of a childhood Buff hero who played for Houston during one of the bleakest local seasons in ancient local baseball history.
Get well, Ed Mierkowicz! – We all need your great heart and presence in a world that hungers for good people to hang around longer. – You’ve got more fans out here who remember you fondly than you probably realize. – Happy Birthday! – And God Bless too!
And, as Paul Harvey also always used to conclude his radio essays, this seems like a good time for borrowing his parting salutation. …
Good Day!
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