From Musial to Mazeroski
RICHARD PETERSON breaks down the role of Polish Americans in Pittsburgh baseball history
On May 13, 1958, Stan Musial, baseball’s greatest Polish-American ballplayer, was taking the day off as his St. Louis Cardinals played the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. His next hit would give him 3,000, something only seven players had accomplished in baseball history to that point, including the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Honus Wagner and Paul Waner.
The 37-year-old Musial hoped to get his next hit in front of St. Louis fans, but, with the Cardinals trailing in the sixth inning, he came into the game as a pinch hitter and doubled to left field. The pitcher who gave up that hit was 22-yearold Moe Drabowsky, who was born in Poland and came to America at 3 years old when his parents fled the looming Nazi threat.
Growing up in Donora, Pa., Musial was a Pirates fan and should have played his baseball in Pittsburgh. He even had a tryout at Forbes Field with the Pirates, but, unfortunately for Pittsburgh fans, Musial had already signed a contract with the Cardinals and Branch Rickey while he was still in high school. The Pirates hoped that Rickey, who signed many youngsters to fill his elaborate minor league farm system, would forget about Musial, but Rickey held on to the teenager who later claimed that he got his power from his mother’s pierogies.
Musial, who made his debut with the Cardinals in 1941, was part of a generation of Polish Americans who began to break into the big leagues in the 1920s and 1930s after learning to play baseball at city playgrounds and on teams sponsored by the Polish Falcons. By the 1940s, 10% of the players in the majors were Polish Americans. Many of those players, however, like slugger Al Simmons, the first Polish American elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, shed their ethnic names. Simmons’ family name was Szymanski.
A member of that first generation of Polish Americans, second baseman Tony Piet, born Pietruska, made his major league debut with the Pirates in 1931. No Bill Mazeroski, he made 36 errors in the 1932 season. He batted .323 in 1933, but was traded away to the Reds at the end of the season.
Wartime surge
By the early 1940s, baseball, on the verge of a player shortage because of the military draft, opened its doors even wider to Polish American ballplayers. Frankie Zak, a string-bean shortstop, was one of the players signed by the Pirates after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He served mostly as a utility ballplayer, but he made the 1944 All-Star game, played at Forbes Field, when Reds shortstop Eddie Miller was injured.
Because of wartime travel restrictions, no other shortstop, including the Pirates’ Frankie Gustine, who was out of town, could get to Pittsburgh in time for the game, so Zak was added to the National League team. Though he didn’t play, that didn’t stop a 2004 Time magazine article from naming Zak as the worst player ever to appear on an All-Star roster.
In baseball’s early postwar period, Polish American Eddie Basinski played only one season with the Pirates before becoming a minor-league legend, but it was one of the most memorable in baseball history. In 1947, he was playing second base when Jackie Robinson played his first games in Pittsburgh. Basinski nearly caused a racial incident when he applied a hard swipe tag to Robinson’s head as he was sliding into second base on an attempted steal. Though nothing more happened on the field, Basinski was booed from the stands and asked for a police escort when he left Forbes Field after the game.
Rickey’s reign
In 1951, Branch Rickey, after his success with the Cardinals and Dodgers, took over the management of a struggling Pirates franchise. One of his first trades sent popular players Wally Westlake and Cliff Chambers to the Cardinals for five players, including Polish American Ted Wilks. The trade didn’t help the Pirates, who finished the 1951 season at 60-94, but Wilks, a forerunner of Roy Face, Dave Giusti and Kent Tekulve, accomplished the remarkable feat of leading the National League in saves.
While a desperate Rickey was trading for veteran players, like Wilks, that he hoped had one good season left in their careers, he also began to sign young players to bonus contracts to help the Pirates long-term. One of his most spectacular signings was Polish American Vic Janowicz, who won the Heisman Trophy in his junior year at Ohio State. Unfortunately for the Pirates, Janowicz wasn’t much of a baseball player. He shared the catching duties in 1953 with Joe Garagiola and, after hitting only .171 in 1954, played in the NFL with the Washington Redskins until he was seriously injured in a car crash in 1956.
In his 1953 rookie season with the Pirates, Janowicz was joined by another Polish American when Branch Rickey, in perhaps the most controversial trade in Pirates history, sent Ralph Kiner and three other players to the Cubs for six players, including former Dodger outfielder Gene Hermanski. While Hermanski batted a dismal .177 in his only season with the Pirates, he had his moment in baseball history in 1947 with the Dodgers. When told that someone had threatened to shoot Jackie Robinson, he told his teammates that they should all wear the number 42 so the shooter wouldn’t know which one of them was Robinson.
Among the players Rickey acquired in his hopeless dream of improving the Pirates was strongarmed pitcher Max Surkont, who, in his prime was called the Polish Stallion, though he should have been dubbed the Kielbasa King. When he was with the Milwaukee Braves, Surkont, who once struck out a record eight batters in a row, was so popular with Milwaukee’s Polish American community that they gave him a year’s supply of kielbasa. By the time he was traded to the Pirates, his weight had ballooned to 250 pounds and was matched by soaring losses. He went 9-18 for the Pirates in 1954 and 7-14 in 1955.
Rickey wasn’t the only general manager to look for fading veterans to fill in until younger players were ready for the big leagues. In 1958, Joe L. Brown, Rickey’s successor as GM for the Pirates, traded for the Cincinnati Reds Ted Kluszewski to play first base. Kluszewski, with his bulging muscles, fit the Polish American stereotype of the powerful steelworker, though injuries had taken away most of his power. He was popular with Pittsburgh’s ethnic, working-class fans but was traded at the end of the 1959 season.
The Polish prince
On that Pirates team with Kluszewski was a young second baseman who would become the most popular Polish American in the city’s sports history and, with one swing of the bat, a Polish prince.
In a city that prides itself on its immigrant heritage and its working-class character, Bill Mazeroski was the perfect hero. Born in nearby Wheeling into a coalminer’s family, he signed a contract with the Pirates at the age of 17. He joined the Pirates two years later in 1956 and by the time he hit the most famous home run in baseball history in the 1960 World Series, he had become a perennial All-Star and Gold Glove second baseman.
For years, Mr. Mazeroski’s tattered glove was on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame with a citation describing him as the greatest second baseman of his generation. When he was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2001, he gave Pittsburgh’s baseball fans another emotionally charged moment when he stopped a minute or two into his prepared speech, and said, “I want to thank all my family and friends for making the long trek up here to hear this crap. That’s it. That’s enough.”
Mr. Mazeroski’s friends and family didn’t have to travel that far when, in 2010, his statue was unveiled outside PNC Park on the banks of the Allegheny River. Mr. Mazeroski, described by teammate Steve Blass as “a man of few words,” told those gathered, including his grandson Billy, who helped with the unveiling, “Geez, how could anyone dream of something like this? All I dreamed of was being a major-league player. I didn’t need all of this.”
Mr. Mazeroski’s modesty and humility aside, his statue stands today as a beacon celebrating the accomplishments of so many immigrant families who came to Pittsburgh dreaming of a better life and helped forge, with their strength and determination, the city’s greatness.
In “Maz, You’re Up,” a children’s book written by Mr. Mazeroski’s daughter-in-law, Kelly, a young boy, wearing a No. 9 jersey, asks his “Pap Pap”: Do “big dreams ever come true?” His grandfather tells him, “Every once in a while they do.”