Fan who shot baseball player was inspiration for novel, movie
Fictional version of deadly obsession told in The Natural
CHICAGO — She inspired a novel and a movie starring Robert Redford when, in 1949, she lured a major league ballplayer she’d never met into a hotel room with a cryptic note and shot him, nearly killing him.
After the headlines faded, Ruth Ann Steinhagen did something else just as surprising: She disappeared into obscurity, living a quiet life unnoticed in Chicago until now, more than a half-century later, when news broke that she had died late last year.
The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed March 15 that Steinhagen died of natural causes on Dec. 29, at the age of 83.
First reported by the Chicago Tribune last week, her identity was a surprise even to the morgue employees who knew about the 1984 movie The Natural, in which she was portrayed by actress Barbara Hershey.
“She chose to live in the shadows and she did a good job of it,” John Theodore, an author who wrote a 2002 non-fiction book about the crime, wrote in an email Sunday.
The story began with what appeared to be just another young woman’s crush on Eddie Waitkus, the Chicago Cubs’ handsome first baseman. So complete was this crush that the teenager set a place for Waitkus, whom she’d never met, at the family dinner table. She turned her bedroom into a shrine to him, and put his photo under her pillow.
After the 1948 season, Waitkus was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies — a fateful turn.
“When he went to the Phillies, that’s when she decided to kill him,” Theodore said in an interview.
Steinhagen had her chance the next season, when the Phillies came to Chicago to play the Cubs at Wrigley Field. She checked into a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel where he was staying and invited him to her room.
“We’re not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about,” she wrote in a note to him after a game at Wrigley on June 14, 1949.
It worked. Waitkus arrived at her room. After he sat down, Steinhagen walked to a closet, said, “I have a surprise for you,” then turned with a rifle she had hidden there and shot him in the chest. Theodore wrote that she then knelt by his side and held his hand on her lap. She told a psychiatrist afterward about how she had dreamed of killing him and found it strange that she was now “holding him in my arms.”
Newspapers devoured and trumpeted the lurid story of a 19-year-old baseball groupie, known in the parlance of the day as a “Baseball Annie.” Among the sensational and probably staged photos was one showing Steinhagen writing in her journal at a table outside her jail cell with a framed photograph of Waitkus propped nearby.
A judge determined she was insane and committed her to a mental hospital. She was released three years later, after doctors determined she had regained her sanity.
Details about the rest of her life are sketchy.
The movie was based on a novel by Bernard Malamud that was inspired by the story. Theodore’s 2002 book was entitled Baseball’s Natural: The story of Eddie Waitkus.