BASKETBALL WHIZ WHO BECAME STAR SHORTSTOP
He was an All-American basketball player at Duke in the early 1950s, setting a single-season NCAA scoring record. He went on to play pro basketball. But Dick Groat was mostly known as one of major league baseball’s leading shortstops of his time.
“I’m remembered as a baseball player and not by the sport I played the best,” Groat once said. “North Carolina is the one place where I’m still remembered as a basketball player.
“I didn’t have speed, power or the greatest arm,” he told Sports Illustrated. “Baseball was work, every day.”
Groat, who died Thursday at 92 in a Pittsburgh hospital, performed that work superbly for 14 big-league seasons. He helped take the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates to their first World Series championship in 35 years while winning the National League’s batting title and MVP Award. He anchored the infield for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1964 when they won the World Series. And he was a five-time All-Star.
Groat lacked range at shortstop, but he was adept at positioning himself and had quick hands, forming an outstanding double-play combination for the Pirates with Bill Mazeroski, a future Hall of Famer.
Mazeroski hit the memorable 1960 World Series-winning home run off the New York Yankees’ Ralph Terry. But Groat, a right-handed batter who was skilled at stroking the ball to the opposite field on the hit and run and seldom struck out, won the batting title with a .325 average. He was the smoothfielding captain of the Pirates, whose lineup also featured Roberto Clemente and Bill Virdon in the outfield and power-hitter Dick Stuart at first base.
“He makes a great play and makes it look easy,” Danny Murtaugh, the manager of the 1960 Pirates, was quoted as saying by Baseball Digest. “Then he comes back and plops in the dugout as if nothing has happened.”
Richard Morrow Groat was born Nov. 4, 1930, in Wilkinsburg, Pa., and grew up in Swissvale, near Pittsburgh.
In basketball, as a 5-foot, 11-inch, 180-pound guard at Duke, Groat had no hesitation about driving through the lane. He hit jump shots and was an outstanding playmaker. He was a two-time AllAmerican
and set an NCAA major-college single-season scoring record with 831 points as a junior in the 195051 season. He averaged 23 points a game for his three seasons at Duke.
Playing shortstop, he led Duke to its first College World Series appearance, in 1952, then joined the Pirates, who were in the midst of a youth movement orchestrated by General Manager Branch Rickey, who came to Pittsburgh from the Dodgers.
Groat batted .284 for the 1952 Pirates, then joined the NBA’s Fort Wayne Pistons (now the Detroit Pistons), who had chosen him as a first-round draft pick. He averaged 11.9 points a game in the 1952-53 season but played in only 26 games while commuting to Duke to complete his degree.
After Groat spent two years in the Army, playing military basketball for part of that time, Rickey told him that he would have to choose between baseball and basketball.
“I was heartbroken,” Groat said. “Basketball was my first love.”
But he returned to the Pirates in 1955 and flourished as they became a championship team five years later.