Hal Trosky
Hal Trosky played first base for the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago
White Sox in the 1930s and 1940s. His career reached its apex in 1936,
when he led the American League in runs batted in with 162, but he has
been consigned to relative obscurity because his career overlapped the
triumvirate of Hall of Fame first basemen Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg,
and Lou Gehrig.
Born Harold Arthur, he arrived on November 11, 1912, to John and Mary (nee
Siepman) Trojovsky. The family, second-generation immigrants from the region
of Germany called Bohemia, moved to their 420-acre farm outside Norway,
Iowa, in 1917. He had two sisters, Annette and Esther, and a brother, Victor.
After an impressive schoolboy and amateur career, Hal was courted with
varying degrees of intensity by the Athletics, the Cardinals, and the Indians.
After graduating from high school, he was offered a minor league contract
by the St. Louis Cardinals. Not confident in how to proceed, Trosky called
on Bing Miller in nearby Vinton. Miller was then a member of Connie Mack’s
powerhouse Philadelphia Athletics, a team that had just played in its second
of three consecutive World Series. Miller was delighted to speak with the
boy.
Miller knew Trojovsky’s reputation and advised him to do nothing until
Mr. Mack was consulted. Hal drove home quite content, but upon returning
to Norway found his father seated in the kitchen with Cleveland Indians’
scout and Cedar Rapids native, Cyril C. “Cy” Slapnicka.
Trosky later told Gordon Cobbledick, the baseball columnist for the Cleveland
Plain Dealer, “I liked Slap, and after we talked baseball for a while he
suggested I sign with him.” Evidently, Slapnicka had been aware of
Hal’s prowess, but hadn’t felt any urgency in pursuing him until he got
wind of the Athletics’ possible interest.
After almost no deliberation, Hal chose the Indians. He signed his first
contract “Harold Trojovsky”, but from then on used the shorter “Trosky,”
as did his siblings. Ironically, a contract offer from Connie Mack arrived
three days later. Hal returned the unsigned document with a note explaining
what had happened and apologizing for the inconvenience. He was touched
that Mack took time to respond with his best wishes for the player’s future
career.
Trosky reported to the Cedar Rapids Bunnies in early 1931, playing for
a $65 monthly salary. He was signed primarily as a pitcher, one who had
the odd habit of hitting cross-handed but from the right side of the plate.
Slapnicka, in a visit to the park to check on his prospects, took player
and manager aside and suggested Hal retain his grip but switch to a left-handed
batting stance. The change was providential, as Trosky played 52 Mississippi
Valley League games that summer as a converted first baseman and, in 162
at-bats, managed 49 hits (including 3 home runs) for a respectable .302
batting average. He followed that mark in 1932 by hitting .307 in 56 games
in the 3-I league, first with Springfield and, after that team folded,
with Burlington, and then .331 after promotion to Quincy. His 15 home runs
in 68 games with Quincy attracted attention in Cleveland, and in 1933 Hal
Trosky began the season as a $200-a-month player with the Toledo Mud Hens
of the American Association.
At the close of the Mud Hens season, Cleveland called, and on September
11, 1933, Hal Trosky started at first in place of Harley Boss. Hal
went 0-for-3 against the Senators’ Monte Weaver, and would wait a full
week before collecting his first major league hit on September 18, a home
run off the Red Sox Gordon Rhodes.
The day before that first hit, September 17, provided a brush with baseball
royalty. In the second game of a doubleheader against the Yankees, Trosky
was playing deep behind first base when Babe Ruth hit a screaming line
drive down the line that carried the novice’s mitt almost halfway into
right field. Hal later had the glove bronzed for his personal collection.
After retrieving the glove, the rookie had to sift through the conflicting
emotions of awe in the presence of a living legend and of fear in the form
of Lou Gehrig striding to the plate. If possible, Gehrig represented an
even greater hazard to Trosky’s well-being than the Bambino, because Ruth
generally hit high, arcing fly balls, while Gehrig could rip a vicious
line drive off any pitch.
Trosky had to cover the bag with second base open, but against Gehrig the
only chance to reel in a hard drive was found in playing farther back on
the outfield grass.
The Babe must have divined Trosky’s fielding dilemma, because he whispered
out the side of his mouth, “Don’t worry about holding me on, kid. I ain’t
going no place. Just drop back a little and play it safe. If he hit one
at you up here, it would take your head off.” Hal backed off and, true
to his word, Ruth stood just a few feet from first and awaited the Yankee
onslaught. It wasn’t that big a deal to the Babe, but Trosky never forgot
that small kindness.
In 44 at-bats that month, spread over 11 games, Hal hit .295 with a double
and two triples and drove in eight runs. That winter, Trosky married Lorraine
Glenn in Norway, Iowa.
In 1934, his first full year in the major leagues, he was little short
of spectacular. Hal played every inning of all 154 games, hit .330 with
35 home runs (at the time the fifth highest total ever by a first-year
player), drove in 142 runs, and posted a slugging average of .598. He finished
seventh in balloting for American League Most Valuable Player. (Even Triple-Crown
winner Lou Gehrig could muster no better than fifth place in the vote.)
The 1935 season marked an increase in Hal’s confidence and an erosion in
his performance. When he was mired in a September slump, a stretch in which
he’d had exactly one hit in 40 at-bats, coach Steve O’Neill, his former
manager at Toledo, suggested Trosky try hitting from the right side against
the Senators.
The next day, in the opener of a doubleheader in Washington, Hal came up
in the first inning and took a right-handed stance. He stunned his teammates
by smoking an Orlin Rogers curve for a single. After a left-handed out
in the fifth, he hit from the right side again in the eighth inning and
knocked a Leon Pettit pitch into the distant reaches of Griffith Stadium’s
left field bleachers for his 23rd home run of the year. Overall in the
two games, Trosky punched five hits in ten at-bats. Three singles and a
home run came from the right side, and one long double from the left.
After the “Sophomore Jinx” season of 1935 (.271/26/113), Trosky announced
during spring training in 1936 that he wouldn’t be switch-hitting anymore.
It proved unnecessary.
The 1934 model Hal Trosky returned for the ’36 campaign. A mid-June spell
in Lakeside Hospital, a result of a clot in his leg that developed following
a batting practice accident, caused him to miss his only three games of
the year. Despite the setback, Trosky put together a 28-game hitting streak
and broke his own team record for home runs in a single season when he
hit number 36 against the Senators. Although the AL pennant went to the
Yankees, 1936 was a memorable year for Trosky, as he led the league in
RBIs (162) and total bases (405). His RBI total over his first three seasons
was greater than the totals amassed by Gehrig, Foxx, or Greenberg over
their first three years.
Following the 1933 call-up, Hal had wed long-time sweetheart Lorraine Glenn
(from Norway, Iowa), and in September of an already-spectacular 1936, they
welcomed their first son, Harold. Baseball ran in the genes. Twenty-two
years later Hal Junior made it to the major leagues for a late season,
two-game cup of coffee as a pitcher with the White Sox.
By 1939, Hal was named team captain. Trosky agreed not only for the extra
$500 stipend, but because he felt that he could serve as a buffer between
some of the less confident players and their acerbic manager, Oscar Vitt.
In mid-season, though, Hal did the unthinkable: he lifted himself from
the lineup and let understudy Oscar Grimes play a few games at first. Trosky
never admitted it to the team, but there were times when his head absolutely
ached. The season ended with Trosky recording only 448 at-bats, the first
season since his 1933 overture that he appeared in less than 150 games.
It was becoming difficult for him to bring the necessary intensity to the
park each day. He was only 26 years old when the season ended, but the
pain from the headaches sapped his vigor.
Over the winter the headaches faded. Hal consulted several doctors in Cleveland
and in Cedar Rapids, but none wase able to pinpoint the source of his discomfort.
As the frequency of attacks decreased, Hal threw himself into his farming
and family life, and by the end of the off-season, he was eager to return
to baseball.
Events in 1940’s spring training provided unmistakable indications of how
the Indians would perform on the field, but not even the closest observers
could have predicted the off-field show that was gradually unfolding. The
players felt their manager was antagonistic and spiteful, despite the press’s
portrayal of him as suffering and misunderstood. The first week in June
brought the cauldron to a boil.
On June 10, after a week of inconsistent play, the Indians were rained
out in Boston and the players spent the day in the hotel lobby dissecting
their misfortune. The blame for the team’s struggles fell on Vitt. Some
of the players advanced the idea of trying to dump the manager, but team
captain Trosky counseled patience. The slugger was a proud man, and wanted
no part of pointing public fingers at anyone, even though Vitt’s words
had repeatedly stung him.
The next evening, after an afternoon Red Sox blow-out of the Indians, Trosky
spoke with Frank Gibbons of the Cleveland Press. He told the scribe that
the Indians could win the pennant with their current players, but had no
chance as long as Vitt was the manager. Gibbons cautioned Hal to wait and
see how things turned out before doing anything rash. Ironically, it was
the same advice Trosky had given his teammates earlier.
The following morning the players checked out of their rooms early. At
breakfast they again discussed solutions for the “Vitt problem.” Later,
on the train ride from Boston to Cleveland, veterans Ben Chapman and Rollie
Hemsley reportedly called Lou Boudreau and Ray Mack to their berth and
told the young infielders that some of the players were circulating a petition
calling for Vitt’s ouster. Boudreau and Mack, along with Al Smith, Beau
Bell, Mike Naymick and Soup Campbell, were excused from participating.
In a meeting with the rest of the players, pitchers Mel Harder and Johnny
Allen told the team that they would go to owner Alva Bradley alone to discuss
the problems. The team disagreed, but appointed Harder as their collective
voice.
On June 13 real tragedy found Trosky. As the team’s train pulled into the
Cleveland station, Hal received word that his mother had died suddenly
in Iowa. Trosky went straight from the train station to the airport, while
Harder called Alva Bradley’s office seeking an appointment with the owner.
Instead of sending Harder alone, ten more of the dissidents went to Bradley’s
office en masse to show him the sincerity of their grievance. The players
were all seasoned veterans, men who worked in the off-season not by choice
but by necessity, and they were men who understood the consequences of
their actions. Clearly, this was no idle grumbling about a stern taskmaster.
Vitt had wounded them deeply enough to spur those extraordinary measures.
The players told Bradley that Vitt had to go if the team was to compete
successfully. They outlined four specific grievances, each of which Bradley
later confirmed as true, and demanded the owner take action.
Trosky even telephoned Bradley from the airport to ensure his absence wouldn’t
be misconstrued. Despite his personal misgivings about the action, the
team captain would not even consider standing idly by while his teammates
pressed the issue.
Bradley told the players that he would look into the matter and warned
them that if word of the meeting was released, the players would be ridiculed
forever.
Gordon Cobbledick found out almost immediately. The Indians won the game
that afternoon, but it was the insurrection that was front-page news in
The Plain Dealer the next morning. The headline for the story was physically
larger on the printed page than that afforded to Hitler’s invasion of Paris.
Bradley went on the record saying that he would take no immediate action
regarding his manager or his players until he had a chance to talk with
the team captain.
As far as Trosky’s involvement in the “Crybaby” incident, rumored so heavily
by the writers, it probably was not nearly as great as some supposed. Three
days after the story broke, on the back page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer,
an apology of sorts was printed that stated that neither Oscar Vitt nor
Hal Trosky had ever claimed that Trosky was bent on usurping Vitt’s authority.
A memo from Alva Bradley concerning the incident was discovered and published
by the Cleveland News in 1951: “We should have won the pennant…our real
trouble started when a group of 10 players came to my office and made four
distinct charges against (Vitt) and asked for his dismissal. The four charges
made against Vitt, on investigations I have made, were 100% correct.”
On August 11 in St. Louis, Hal swung his way into the record books by becoming
the seventeenth player in major league history to clout 200 home runs.
He finished the season batting.295. His 93 RBIs marked the first full major
league season he had played in which he failed to drive in at least 100
runs. He hit 39 doubles and a team-leading 25 home runs. The headaches
hit hard again in August and September, but Hal loathed missing any game
in the tight pennant race. The Indians finished second, just one game behind
Detroit.
The 1941 season began with none of the flourish that surrounded Bob Feller’s
no-hitter the year before. One constant was Trosky’s headaches. They were
striking with no notice and leaving a wake of debilitating agony. For a
hitter who made a living off fastballs, he was powerless against a blurry
white apparition that he said sometimes looked “like a bunch of white feathers.”
Hal played less and less. The migraines were now almost unbearable, so
on August 11, Cleveland began a seven game road trip without their slugger.
Trosky was left home with Oscar Grimes assuming first-base duties, primarily
because the headaches frequently left him non-functional on the diamond.
Hal rejoined the team for its last stop in Chicago. In the sixth inning
of the opener of a doubleheader at Comiskey Park, Trosky’s Indian career
came to an abrupt end when he fractured his thumb in a collision with White
Sox pitcher Ted Lyons. The slugger missed the final 39 games of the season
and, as it turned out, never wore Cleveland colors again.
The Indians finished in a tie for fourth place with the Tigers and Hal
drove in only 51 runs in 310 at-bats. In February 1942, Hal told Gayle
Hayes of the Des Moines Register that he wouldn’t be playing baseball that
year. It was, he was quoted, “for the best interest of the Cleveland club
and for myself that I stay out of baseball…I have visited various doctors
in the larger cities in the United States and they have not helped me.
If, after resting this year, I find that I am better, perhaps I’ll try
to be reinstated. If I don’t get better, then my major league career is
over.”
Trosky passed 1942 on his farm in Iowa. He devoured news of the war, farmed,
and despite some interest from the Yankees, waited for a call from the
draft board. Hal was evidently a decent farmer, averaging production of
over 90 bushels of corn per acre in a time before the advent of modern
farming technology, but he wanted to contribute on the front lines.
Hal worked out for the White Sox and in November the Indians sold his contract
to Chicago for $45,000. In March 1944, the army officially declared Hal
Trosky “4-F,” unsuitable for military service, due to his history of headaches.
Despite a treatment protocol of vitamin shots, the army wasn’t willing
to take a chance. After three days of evaluation, the doctors stood by
their judgment.
The White Sox took advantage of the army’s concession. Hal played baseball
in 1944 like a man with great talent who had been out of the game for two
seasons. In April he logged several multi-RBI games, but he showed no consistency.
His play was marked by a succession of solid games followed by mediocre
performances.
Headaches notwithstanding, Trosky managed 10 home runs in 1944, which was
enough to lead his team in that category. Including his 1944 season, Hal
led his teams seven times in home runs. According to the SABR Home Run
Encyclopedia, Trosky homered in nine different parks and off 112 different
pitchers; his most frequent victims were Tommy Bridges and Bump Hadley.
Of his 228 home runs, 106 were hit on the road, and 122 at home. No one
but Earl Averill hit more at Cleveland’s League Park.
At the end of 1944, with the White Sox in seventh place after winning only
71 times, Hal called it quits again. He headed home for some hunting and
farming, and to await another possible call-up to support the war effort.
1945 found Trosky working again at the Amana Refrigeration plant. The headache
pain had been, in part, controlled by vitamin B-1 shots and by a significant
reduction in his daily intake of dairy products. It was ironic that an
Iowa dairy farmer was allergic to the very stuff his animals produced,
and that he consumed so frequently in order to maintain his athletic frame.
The treatments, along with some emotional distance from his time with the
Indians, helped lessen the migraines considerably, and the end of the war
presented Trosky with one more opportunity.
The White Sox offered Hal a contract for $21,000 to play in 1946. Hal hit
only .254 with two home runs and 31 RBIs. Despite Chicago’s offer of $25,000
to suit up again in 1947, the 34-year old Trosky knew it was time to hang
up the spikes. His baseball career complete, he was able to devote more
of his time to the infinitely greater demands of being a father not only
to Hal Junior, but also to sons James and Lynn and to their youngest, daughter
Mary Kay.
Following his official release in February 1947, the White Sox hired Trosky
as a scout. Between 1947 and 1950, he traveled the tiny towns of eastern
Iowa looking for “the next Trosky.” In 1947 he also managed a semipro team,
the Amana Freezers, sponsored by Amana Refrigeration. That team consisted
largely of former University of Iowa baseball and football players and
included future baseball major leaguer Jack Dittmer and NFL Hall of Fame
star Emlen Tunnell. Dittmer played second base for Milwaukee for years
and Tunnell intercepted 79 passes for the New York Giants during his professional
career. The Freezers went 27-2 and just missed qualifying for the Amateur
World Series in Kansas.
Hal left the Freezers the next year, and the White Sox in 1950, to settle
down to farming (owing two over the next 25 years) before taking up agricultural
real estate sales around Cedar Rapids in 1962.
Trosky was, in many ways, a typical midwestern man. He raised his family
with a firm sense of discipline; he hunted, played cards, and went to church.
His primary contact with baseball came in his participation with the Iowa
High School Baseball Coaches Association. The archives of that organization,
later run by Trosky’s nephew Harold “Pinky” Primrose, show that he was
an active lecturer for many years, until the mid-1970’s.
Hal suffered a heart attack in early 1978 and by 1979 was only moving around
with the support of a cane. On June 18 he collapsed. The doctors said the
heart attack was so massive that Trosky was dead by the time he reached
the floor. He was officially pronounced dead on arrival at Mercy Hospital
in Cedar Rapids, and is buried in St Michael’s cemetery on a hillside overlooking
his hometown of Norway, Iowa.
Sources
Schneider, R. (2003) Cleveland Indians Encyclopedia
Thorn, J., Birnbaum, P., Deane, B., Neyer, R., Schwarz, A., Dewey, D.,
Acocella, N., and Wayner, P. (2004). Total Baseball, Completely Revised
and Updated: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia, Warner Books, New
York
Cleveland News (1933 – 1941)
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Cleveland Press (1930 – 1946)
Des Moines Register
The Sporting News
New York Daily News
New York Times
Interviews with:
Lorraine Trosky (widow); additionally, used her archival collections for
un-cataloged material
Susan Volz (neice); additionally, used her private collections for un-cataloged
material
Gayle Holt (neice)
Russell Schneider (journalist and team historian)
Interviews with players:
Rick Ferrell
Mel Harder
Bob Feller
Roy Hughes
Denny Galehouse
Thornton Lee
Willis Hudlin
Ralph Hodgin |