Rogers Hornsby
Rogers Hornsby (
April 27,
1896 in
Winters, Texas -
January 5,
1963 in
Chicago, Illinois), nicknamed "The Rajah", was a
second baseman and
manager in
Major League Baseball who played most of his career in
St. Louis (for the
St. Louis Browns and the
St. Louis Cardinals), with shorter stints for the
Chicago Cubs, the
Boston Braves, and the
New York Giants. His .358 career
batting average is the second highest in major league history, trailing only the .366 mark of
Ty Cobb, and is the highest of any right-handed hitter or
National League player. He was elected to the
Baseball Hall of Fame in
1942. He has also been given a star on the
St. Louis Walk of Fame.
Hornsby is considered by many followers of baseball's history to be one of the game's greatest hitters (and perhaps its greatest right-handed hitter of all time), on a level with
Ted Williams,
Ty Cobb,
Babe Ruth and
Stan Musial. He holds the modern record for highest batting average in a season, with .424 in 1924, and won baseball's
Triple Crown in 1922 and 1925. He won the NL's
MVP Award twice, in 1925 and
1929. At his peak ability, from
1920 to 1925, Hornsby led his league in batting average all six years, in
RBI four years, and in
home runs twice. Over the
1921 through 1925 seasons, Hornsby
averaged an astonishing .402 for five years, a feat unlikely to be equaled again. He hit over 300 homers in his career, not all of them as a second baseman. He is among the top four for home runs by a second baseman, as of the start of the
2005 season.
In addition to his success on the field, he was one of baseball's more talented player-managers, guiding his Cardinals to a
World Series victory over
Babe Ruth's
New York Yankees in
1926.
Hornsby was one of the more controversial characters in baseball history. Although he did not drink or smoke, he was a
compulsive gambler. As with
Ty Cobb, his photogenic smile belied a dark side. One writer characterized him as "a liturgy of hatred," and according to legendary baseball writer Fred Lieb, he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. His chief interest was in winning, and he could be as sarcastic and uncompromising with club owners as he was with his teammates. When Hornsby was traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the New York Giants after the 1926 season, the deal was held up because Hornsby, as part of his contract as the manager of the Cardinals (he was a player/manager at the time), owned several shares of stock in the Cardinals. Cardinals owner Sam Breadon offered Hornsby a sum for the stock considerably lower than what Hornsby demanded for it, and neither would budge. Eventually, the other owners of the National League made up the difference, and the trade went through.
As with some other star athletes, as a manager he had trouble relating to players who shared neither his talent nor his zeal for winning. As his playing skills waned, he tended to be shuffled from team to team, wearing out his welcome quickly among his charges. Having won the World Series as a player/manager with the Cardinals, he was traded to the Giants for 1927, then to the Boston Braves for 1928, and finally moved on the Chicago Cubs in 1929, where he became their player/manager (and remained for three seasons thereafter), thus playing for four different teams in four years.
As
Bill Veeck related in his autobiography,
Veeck as in Wreck, his father Bill Sr., who was President and General Manager of the
Chicago Cubs, had hired Hornsby, and soon disposed of him when the usual problems surfaced. Some years later, when the junior Veeck hired Hornsby to manage his
St. Louis Browns for a time, his widowed mother wrote him a letter asking, "What makes you think you're any smarter than your Daddy was?" After a near-mutiny by the players, Veeck let Hornsby go, and his mother wrote back, "Told ya so!" Veeck, alert as ever to an opportunity for publicity, arranged a stunt in which he was awarded a trophy by the players for freeing them from Hornsby's control.
In his later years, Hornsby's disdain for younger players only increased. According to the book
Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?, Hornsby was hired by the fledgling
New York Mets to scout all the major league players. His report was not especially useful, as the best compliment he could come up with for anyone was "Looks like a major league ballplayer"–his assessment of
Mickey Mantle. In another anecdote, Hornsby was reviewing a group of major league players with his customary none-too-complimentary remarks. Included in the group were Chicago Cubs' third baseman
Ron Santo and outfielder
Billy Williams. Hornsby had just gotten through dimissing one player with the comment, "You'd better go back to shining shoes because you can't hit," when Santo whispered to Williams, "If he says that to me, I'm going to cry." When Hornsby came to Santo, he said, "You can hit in the big leagues right now," then turned to Williams and said, "So can you."
Contrasting with his usual contempt for young players, he could be generous with those who had the "right stuff". When Hornsby was managing Cincinnati, Reds players recalled him giving impromptu batting tips to the opposition, unable to help himself. Biographers of Ted Williams cite the story that the young Williams spoke with the aging Hornsby about hitting. Hornsby's secret was simply this:
Wait for a good pitch to hit. That became Williams'
creed and the creed of many who followed.
As
Pete Rose said to a reporter in
1978 while he was pursuing a 44-game
hitting streak and had just tied Hornsby's personal best at 33, "Ol' Rogers was quite a hitter, wasn't he?"
Hornsby was the great-grandson of early Texas pioneer
Reuben Hornsby and is a distant relative of musician
Bruce Hornsby, who sometimes performs with a bust of Rogers on his
piano. His unusual first name was his mother's maiden name.
He died in
1963 of a
heart attack after
cataract surgery. He was buried in the Hornsby Bend cemetery east of
Austin, Texas.
In
1999, he ranked number 9 on
The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, the highest-ranking second baseman. Later that year, he was elected to the
Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
|
Hornsby tagging out Ruth who was trying to steal second, ending the 1926 World Series. |
See:
Career Statistics for a complete explanation.
| G | AB | H | 2B | 3B | HR | R | RBI | BB | SO | AVG | OBP | SLG |
| 2,259 | 8,173 | 2,930 | 541 | 169 | 301 | 1,579 | 1,584 | 1,038 | 679 | .358 | .434 | .577 |
Baseball is my life, the only thing I know and can talk about. My only interest.-- Rogers Hornsby
People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.-- Rogers Hornsby
I have never been a yes man.-- Rogers Hornsby
I don't want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to go chase it. -- Rogers Hornsby
Son, when you pitch a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know.-- Umpire
Bill Klem, responding to complaints from a young pitcher who thought some of his pitches to Rogers Hornsby were strikes, though Klem had called them as balls (possibly
apocryphal).
*
Baseball Hall of Fame*
Rogers Hornsby article at Hornsby Bend family history site*
St. Louis Walk of Fame*
Baseball America,
Donald Honig.
*
Ted Williams: An American Hero, Leigh Montville
*
Hitter: Life and Turmoils of Ted Williams,
Ed Linn*
Baseball As I Have Known It, Fred Lieb. Tempo, 1970.
