Word: pitcherful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Runyon's sawed-off Napoleon was a wiry Chicago southpaw pitcher named Dickie Kerr who had just won his second game for the White Sox in baseball's most embarrassing World Series. Behind him, some of the best players in the history of the game had played like bushers. Shoeless Joe Jackson, perhaps the greatest outfielder of them all, was unaccountably awkward under easy flies; Swede Risberg, the sure-handed shortstop, was fielding grounders with his feet; First Baseman Chick Gandil seemed asleep on the sack. But sawed-off Kerr had pitched his heart out against the Cincinnati...
...pitch to a burly batter named Babe Ruth one afternoon in 1921 in the old Polo Grounds. And the Babe belted it so far it set a special kind of record: it broke the hands of an outfield clock some 500 ft. from the plate. It was Pitcher Kerr who asked his boss Charles ("The Old Roman") Comiskey for a raise after winning 40 games in two seasons. "Just give me a dollar more than the $4,800 I'm getting," he pleaded. Once more he was beaten; Comiskey refused. So Dickie Kerr took his pride to the outlaw...
Never, that is, until he had drifted down to a job as manager of the Class D Daytona Beach farm club for the St. Louis Cardinals. There he had a skinny Polish kid named Stanley Musial who thought he was a pitcher. Kerr watched the boy and decided that as a pitcher he made a superb hitter. When Musial was not working on the mound, Kerr kept him in the line-up as an outfielder so that his potent bat was always available. Then one day Stan fell on his throwing arm and finished his career...
Million-Dollar Accident. Dickie Kerr disagreed. He took the discouraged boy into his home, fed him and befriended him, and made a place for his pregnant wife. "I convinced him that he wasn't much of a pitcher anyway," says Kerr. "And as a hitter he was a natural. You might say Stan's was a million-dollar accident...
...make 3.000 big-league hits (TIME, May 12), Dickie Kerr and his wife heard the news in their new Houston home, a neat white frame bungalow that had just been bought for them, out of gratitude and a sense of everlasting obligation, by a sore-armed Class D pitcher named Stanley Frank Musial...