Old Reliable Passes On

Tommy Henrich, a great, but under-remembered, Yankees star passed away today at the ripe old age of 96.  Here’s an AP article with the highlights of his career, which included the first walk-off homerun to win a World Series game in 1949 and being the batter who reached first base on Dodger catcher Mickey Owen’s passed ball in the 1941 World Series, the most famous moment of that championship series.

Henrich isn’t remembered nearly as well as a he was a generation ago, when there were more people alive who had seen him play.  The good thing about being a lesser star on the Yankees in the period from 1920 to 1964 is that you got to play and win a lot of World Series and get some glory at the time you played.  The down side is that after the people who saw you play pass on, no one remembers you for the forest of titans who wore pinstripes, like Ruth, Gehrig, Dickey, Berra, Dimaggio, Mantle, Maris and Ford.

Do many fans today remember Tony “Poosh ‘Em Up” Lazzari even though he was a tremendous player in his own right and was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1991?  Lazzari had the curse of having to be the second best Italian American ballplayer to come out of San Francisco during his era.

A couple of things prevented Henrich from putting up the kind of career numbers that might make him better remembered today.  First, he played for the Yankees system at a time when it was the deepest in its history.  When Henrich broke into the majors in 1937, the Yankees and the Cardinals had a strangle hold on minor league talent, with more than fifty (that’s right — 50) minor league teams between them.

The result was that the top Yankees’ farm team in this era was generally as good or better than the weak sisters of the American League, the Philadelphia A’s, the Washington Senators and especially the St. Louis Browns.  As a result, many major league caliber players were stuck playing for Yankees (and Cardinals) farm teams in the American Association and International League (both the Yankees and the Cardinals frequently fielded teams in both of these leagues, which would now be considered AAA leagues, at the same time).

The upshot for Henrich was that he didn’t reach the majors until he was age 24.   If he had signed with a bad or mediocre major league team, he likely would have reached the majors two or three years earlier.

Also, like most the players of his era, he lost three full seasons to military service (he was in the Coast Guard) during WWII.  It came right in the heart of his career, just after he had established himself as a great major league player.

His best regular seasons were 1941 (when he hit 31 HRs, third in the AL behind Ted Williams and another under-remembered Yankee great Charlie “King Kong” Keller; Dimaggio finished fourth with 30 dingers) 1947 (when he led the AL in triples and scored 106 runs) and 1948 (when he led the AL again in triples and runs scored (138) and drove in another 100 runs).

Henrich was no Dimaggio, but he did everything pretty well (hit for a decent average, hit for power, ran well and got on base).  He was the kind of lesser star the Yankees always (or, at least since 1920) have had lot of, who helped fill out the power-house Yankees teams of yester-year and today.