Larry Miggins
Former Houston Buff (1949, 1951, 1953-54) and St. Louis Cardinal (1948-1952) outfielder Larry Miggins only played the final game of the 1948 season and 2 additional games in 1952 as his MLB career, but there was something special about the first of his two big league homers that never made it to print. This brief account by Associated Press sports writer Joe Reichler that appeared in several dailies around the country of May 14, 1952, serves as an example of the ho-hum treatment that Larry got from the media in an apparent spring hailstorm of major league long ball action:
“Warning to all major league pitchers:
“Storm clouds ahead! Take cover! Watch out for an early shower! The batters are knocking down the fences again! It’s raining home runs!
“The hurlers got an inkling of things to come at Ebbets Field yesterday when five of their offerings were hammered for home runs as the Brooklyn Dodgers won a 14-8 slugging match from the St. Louis Cardinals. Gil Hodges and pitcher Ben Wade homered for the Dodgers. Stan Musial hit two out of the park for the Cards and Larry Miggins hit one.”
~ Joe Reichler, Sports Writer, Associated Press, Corpus Christi Times, Saturday, May 14, 1952, Page 21.
“And Larry Miggins hits one?”
Oh, really? …. Larry Miggins hits one? …. Is that the best you can do for a guy’s first home run in the big leagues, Joe Reichler?
Maybe so. If you take into account that Larry Miggins hit his second and only other big league homer just a few days later against future Hall of Famer Warren Spahn of the Boston Braves, you may have already reported all the world needs to know about baseball player Miggins in your job of daily describing in a fairly consistent pattern the wins and losses of a big league baseball season.
They don’t call the job ‘beat writer’ for nothing.
It’s just that this first homer carried with it the irony of an old friendship dream and wish that made it a lot different from most. This first home run by Larry Miggins, as called by future Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully, had a most unusual date with destiny. And remember too, and the always popping up irony wrinkle in baseball history would have nothing to do with the oatmeal treatment of this seemingly ordinary story of a young MLB prospect nailing one of the few home runs he would hit in pursuit of a big league career. Larry Miggins already had been touched by history in 1946 as one of the men who would play in Jackie Robinson’s first game in organized baseball for the Montreal Royals. He would play that game as the third baseman for the opposing home cub, the Jersey City Giants.
“I always say that I helped Jackie get off to a good start in his first game,” Miggins still likes to claim. “Because I played so deep that day, Robinson was able to beat out a couple of bunt singles on me. And, of course, there’s also that picture of Jackie sliding under the throw to me on a steal of third base at Jersey City.”
The first Miggins home run day at Ebbets Field was even more special because of the personal connection between Larry Miggins and Vin Scully. Both New York City boys had attended high school at Fordham Prep, where they played baseball on the wings of special personal dreams. If memory serves, Scully was a year ahead of Miggins in class, but that’s really immaterial to this story.. They were friends – and both played baseball with slightly different baseball future dreams about the game.
Vin Scully tells the story best – and I couldn’t think of a more glorious Easter weekend tale about heart-inspired dreams, the power of faith, ability, and effort working together, and the resurrection of spiritual deliverance through baseball.
In the blocked section that follows, here’s how the wonderful researcher and writer Curt Smith handled this story about Vin Scully as it was told in “Pull Up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story” by Curt Smith, Potomac Books (2009), Page 17. Smith starts where all true Vin Scully stories begin – with the reader’s mind in a listening mode, sitting with Vin, listening to him describe his old pal and baseball teammate Larry Miggins:
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Bronx born Larry Miggins was a “tall, rangy kid,” said Scully, “our best athlete,” and already pining for the bigs.
In 2000 Vin told Fordham University’s commencement how they had spoken in a less mock-suspense than will-o’-the-wisp way. “I want to be a major-league baseball player,” Miggins whispered in a Prep Assembly. “I wonder what the odds against that would be?”
“I want to be a major-league broadcaster,” Scully countered in the back row of the auditorium. “Whoa, I wonder what the odds against that would be?”
Vin mused “about the odds if we both make it.” Then: “I wonder what the odds would be if I were broadcasting a game in which you played?”
Making the 1948 Cardinals, Miggins resurfaced in 1952. That May 13, he batted in the fourth inning at Brooklyn: “one of the two [usually third and seventh] I did each game,” said Scully. Suddenly, “I’m sitting there, overwhelmed that this is happening.”
Preacher Roe threw a fastball: “a cantaloupe,” said Miggins, clearing the wall. Stunned, Vin called his pal’s first of two big-league homers “as close to breaking down doing a baseball game or any other sports event I have ever experienced” – still towering, like the time.
~ Curt Smith, “Pull Up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story, (2009), Potomac, Page 17.
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Even Scully and Miggins may not have dreamed that their off-the charts wish would go so far as to include a Miggins fist big league homer, but it did. The improbability of that happening too would have taken us to a whole other universe of statistical improbability.
The Rest of the Story
Shortly after I posted this column earlier this morning, I received this short reminder note from fabled 27K game pitcher Ron Necciai about the Scully-Miggins phenomenon. It simply read: “strange, same day as my only 27K game. Keep em coming. – Ron” My e-mail reply to the great guy I’ve learned Ron Necciai to be went simply like this – and it completes the rest of the story as far as I can take it:
E-Mail Reply from Bill McCurdy to Ron Necciai
Those two things happening on the same day simply amplify the possibility that God was working overtime on May 13, 1952.
When we talked the other day, you mentioned the million dollar dividend you’ve been paid on your small change personal investment as a player. I understand what you mean, but please allow me to disagree with you on the value of your investment. On May 13, 1952, you, like Scully and Miggins on the same day, went out there and did something that no one else had ever done before or since: you struck out 27 batters in one nine inning game that also “just happened” to end up as a no-hitter. Ron, that was no small thing – not to the millions of us slightly younger guys across America who were out there busting our butts to also find a place in baseball.
As a 14-year old, your example taught me to believe in the possible – in great and good outcome terms. In spite of that one first time that I was pulled into a game and struck out the side on nine pitches, I never developed into a great pitcher – not even a good one – but I will never forget how that one inning felt. And I also know that the same attitude has followed me into everything else I’ve tried to do since that time. And you must accept part of the credit for anything worthwhile I’ve ever done. Your example taught me to believe in myself – and all the great and good things that baseball and life both have to offer.
And please take these words as my humble $5.00 investment in your personal baseball dividend fund. You deserve that Lincoln and more.
Regards, Bill
Happy Easter, Everybody!
Thank you Curt Smith, Vin Sculy, Larry Miggins and Ron Necciai. In all its now even expanded splendor as a magical day in baseball, it’s even more fitting as a great story for the Easter Weekend.
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