There was only one Dizzy Dean
Ex-Cardinal great makes one final mound appearance
EDITOR’S NOTE: With Christmas just ten days away, a friend of mine suggested sharing a chapter from “Last Time Out” might help readers fill out their shopping list for those baseball fans in the family. The book, a collection of stories about the final games of 43 of baseball’s all-time greats, is available on Amazon and locally at Barnes & Noble, Hearth & Soul, Books A Million and Midtown Reader. Here’s one of my favorite chapters about the great Dizzy Dean. My favorite chapter, of course, is my final chapter about my son’s major-league debut for the St. Louis Cardinals. Happy reading! Merry Christmas, all my reader friends!
OL’ DIZ SHUTS ’EM UP ONE LAST TIME
DATE: September 28, 1947
SITE: Sportsman’s Park, St. Louis, Missouri
The phrase has roared through history like a Dizzy Dean fastball: “It ain’t bragging,” he once reasoned, “if you can do it.” As he strode out to the mound at Sportsman’s Park, home of the worst team in baseball—the St. Louis Browns—for the final game of the 1947 season, it’s a safe bet Dizzy Dean, one of the greatest pitchers in St. Louis Cardinals history, was laughing.
What was he doing in a Browns uniform? What was he doing, about 40 pounds over his playing weight, on a baseball mound? Was he a baseball announcer or a pitcher? What had that big mouth of his gone and gotten him into this time?
As great a character as ever strode across a big-league stage, Jerome Hanna “Dizzy” Dean was Davy Crockett in spikes, a twinkle-eyed braggart with a prodigious talent and a personality that jumped out of America’s sports pages. There didn’t seem to be anything that he wouldn’t do or say. The stories, apocryphal or not, have been out there for 50 years.
After his younger brother, Paul, fired a no-hitter in the second game of a doubleheader—Dizzy won the opener—he quipped, “If I’d have knowed Paul was going to have throwed a no-hitter, I’d have throwed one, too.”
Or, the day after he was struck in the head by a throw in a World Series game, “They X-rayed my head and didn’t find nothing.”
Or when he was criticized for his grammatical mistakes as an announcer. “Never went fur in school,” he said, wryly. “Didn’t get out of the third grade, you know; didn’t want to pass my father.”
Or confronted with the fact that he gave three different writers three different birthdays and birthplaces on the same day: “Them ain’t lies,” he said. “Them’s scoops.”
Well, now it was Dizzy’s time to do it. After retiring from baseball in 1940, Dean had gone into radio broadcasting and been a hit. He won a wide following throughout St. Louis for his colorful expressions and folksy manner.
But on January 11, 1947, St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon had decided to go to a two-state, six-station network to do Cardinals games live. And he chose the announcing team of Harry Caray and Gabby Street. Dean, despite his popularity in St. Louis, was relegated to doing the worst team around, covering the St. Louis Browns with John O’Hara.
Dean went after Breadon on and off the air. He once described the Cardinals owner as “a shameless skinflint, so tight he even sends paper towels to the laundry and schemes to save further money by requiring the players to hitchhike between cities.” He was just as tough on the sad Browns, ripping their hitters, their strategy, and the fans.
Once, with the stands nearly empty, Dean quipped, “The peanut vendors is going through the stands. They is not doing so good because there is more of them than there is of customers.” He saved his toughest criticism for the beleaguered Browns pitching staff (a league-worst 4.33 team ERA) suggesting time and again that he could go down there and do as well. “I can beat nine of ten who calls themselves pitchers today.”
With the season winding down, the offer to do just that came from Browns owner Dick Muckerman, who was desperate to help attendance. The Browns had drawn just 350 fans a few days before Dean’s stunt. So here came a $1 contract and a chance to pitch the home finale. Dizzy Dean jumped at it.
There was a bit of a brouhaha in the Browns’ front office over the stunt. Muddy Ruel, the Browns manager, refused to sit on the bench and actually left town. But Dizzy was going to have his day. On September 17, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a droll brief with a little more editorializing than usual, announcing that Dean would return. “Trying to brighten the waning days of the American League season for their cash customers, the Browns today signed Jerome Hanna ‘Dizzy’ Dean to a player contract. Ed Smith, publicity director for the club announced that Dean, who recently in his baseball broadcasts had expressed the wish to test his arm against the hitters of today, would be given the chance in a Brownie uniform. “
According to Smith, the Browns, before signing Dizzy, had checked with American League president Will Harridge. Nothing was said about the company carrying Dean’s insurance or Dizzy’s beneficiaries.” A St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist was somewhat kinder—if as noncommittal. “That fans were interested in Dizzy’s view is evident from the fan mail so voluminous, we’re told, that the Browns decided to sign Dizzy for a one-game test— with more to follow if, perhaps Diz can prove his point.
“At 37, defying Father Time, bursitis, and six or more years absence from a major-league uniform, probably neither the club nor Diz is expectant. . . . But his appearance will make a very interesting ‘pot-boiler’ to help swell a last-day attendance.
“Many of us will be present to again view this assertive and aggressive fellow who provided this city more baseball thrills and baseball color than any player since the days of Sisler and Hornsby.”
Those were the days for Dizzy Dean, a 30-game winner for the Cardinals in 1934 and one of the most entertaining players in the history of the sport. A pitcher with untold confidence—and matchless results—he blew onto the scene like a Missouri twister, wreaked havoc for a few years, and was gone.
Columnist Red Smith was there the September day in 1934 when Dean won his 30th game, pitching the Cardinals to the National League championship, beating the Cincinnati Reds. “It was Dean’s ballgame,” he wrote. “He, more than anyone else, had kept the Cardinals in the pennant race throughout the summer. He had won two games in the last five days to help bring the Red Birds to the top of the league.”
Here, with the championship apparently hinging on the outcome of this game, was his chance to add the brightest jewel to his crown, and at the same time, achieve the personal triumph of becoming the first National League pitcher since 1917 to win 30 games in a season.
“And it was Dizzy’s crowd. . . . They whooped when he rubbed resin on his hands. They yowled when he fired a strike past a batter. They stood and yelled when he lounged to the plate, trailing his bat in the dust. And when, in the seventh inning, with the game already won by eight runs, he hit a meaningless single, the roar that thundered from the stands was as though he had accomplished the twelve labors of Hercules.”
That was the way Dizzy Dean captivated a crowd. And even though he’d been away from the game for a long time, he was confident he could do it again. While Dean worked out, preparing himself for the game, he was met with more than a few scornful looks, some of which, no doubt, came from the Browns pitching staff itself, who hardly wanted to stand for criticism from a washed-up big-leaguer.
The day of the game, the Post-Dispatch advance was similarly tart. “If you like track and field events with your baseball and if you’re interested in seeing Dizzy Dean try to pitch again, then Sportsman’s Park’s the place this afternoon, starting at 1:30 o’clock.” After five field events and a 60-yard sprint (won by White Sox outfielder Thurman Tucker), the game began and Dean toed the rubber against the White Sox, a 70-84, sixth-place club that had Rudy York (15 home runs) as its only power threat. Future Hall of Famer Luke Appling (.306) was at shortstop and Taffy Wright, who finished tied for third in the AL batting race with Boston’s Johnny Pesky (.324), was in left.
Once the game began, Dean, looking strange in a baggy Browns uniform, turned back the clock. He pitched effortlessly and worked through the White Sox lineup—Don Kolloway, Bob Kennedy, Dave Philley, Rudy York, the whole bunch— without a hit or a run.
The 15,916 on hand—by far the biggest Browns crowd in months and third largest of the season— were loving it. He didn’t have much velocity, but he sure knew how to pitch. As they reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the next morning, it was impressive. “Not so fast as when he pitched 30 victories for the Cardinals in 1934, Dean was remarkably free and easy in his motion. He kept the ball so close to the strike zone that he forced the White Sox batters to swing. As a result, he made only 39 pitches in the four innings [he worked].”
And that wasn’t all. When Dean came up in the third inning against White Sox left-hander Eddie Lopat, a roar rose through the stands. Dizzy was carrying a bat painted black and white. He called it his “Zebra model.”
Home plate umpire Cal Hubbard called time and ordered Dean to go get another one. Dizzy nodded, walked back to the Browns’ dugout, and came back with a different bat, this one “grotesquely painted with red bands on it.” Hubbard laughed, let Dean use it, and on Lopat’s first pitch, the veteran right-hander lashed a single, then later slid theatrically into second base. His wife, Pat, seated next to the Browns’ dugout, hollered in: “He proved his point. Now get the damned fool out of there before he kills himself.”
Dean returned to the mound and worked one more scoreless inning. But in between innings, he told Coach Fred Hofmann, running the team in Ruel’s absence, that he’d pulled a muscle running out his single and was through pitching for the afternoon. Dean got a terrific ovation from the crowd. His big-league career was over. It wasn’t a bad way to go out.
In true Browns fashion, reliever Glenn Moulder surrendered five runs in the ninth to ruin Dean’s good work. The White Sox were 5–2 victors. Dean wasn’t about to make a comeback, though.
“I still think I could pitch well enough to win up here but I don’t intend to try it,” he said after the game. “I have a contract as a radio announcer and I intend to stick to that job.”
Which, of course, he did, eventually going all the way to nationwide fame, working for NBC Television, doing their Game of the Week baseball telecasts. Not bad for a guy who didn’t get through third grade.
His pitching career was mighty brief by Hall of Fame standards—a 12-year run but only six seasons where he appeared in more than 20 games. Though he’s most often compared to Sandy Koufax, the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame great who retired at 30 from arm miseries, Koufax actually pitched in 80 more games—397 to Dean’s 317.
Yet Dizzy Dean was elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1953, going into Cooperstown in the very same year that Joe DiMaggio appeared on the ballot for the first time. DiMaggio finished a distant eighth in the balloting.
In his induction speech, Dizzy Dean left the Cooperstown audience the way he left everybody throughout his 12-year run in the big leagues—laughing.
“The Good Lord was good to me,” Dean said, winding up his talk. “He gave me a strong body, a good right arm, and a weak mind.”
John Nogowski’s “Last Time Out” is available on Amazon and in several local bookstores. His new baseball book — “Diamond Duels,” a fascinating inside look at the game’s historic pitcher/hitter matchups, is available for pre-order on Amazon and will be out March 4.
Never knew that about The Diz, thanks.
I'd be remiss in this space if I didn't recommend Robert Gregory's Diz: The Story of Dizzy Dean and Baseball During the Great Depression. Reading it was how Dean became my favorite old-timer.