CHARLIE GEHRINGER--SECONDBASEMAN

                                    

BIG MOE

     Next to Rogers Hornsby, Charlie Gehringer of the Detroit Tigers was considered the greatest secondbaseman of all time. He was a home-grown Michigan native who’d been holding down second base since 1926 and was going to the Hall of Fame. There was no more popular player in the history of the franchise, and that included Cobb and Greenberg. He was a darling of the front office and the fans and press. In Detroit he could do no wrong. He was a better fielder than Hornsby and a more all-around player, probably the most fundamentally sound player in the game, a guy who went about his business as a total professional, and a master of every phase of the game—running bases, sliding, bunting, hitting behind the runner, going out on pop flies, making the doubleplay, going to either hole, stealing a base, getting you a scoring sacrifice fly, anything you needed to win a game.

     He was a quiet reliable guy who, like DiMaggio, never made a mental error and could freeze you with a look if YOU made one, because you were hurting the club and taking food out of his mouth; he was the kind of leader you didn’t want to disappoint, all business, respecting the game like a religion, and if you didn’t respect it the same way, and disappointed him, you were gone.

     He hardly said boo to me when I came up, never went out of his way to help me or give me advice, and he knew who I was, knew I’d been a top infield prospect in the organization and being groomed to take over his position even if I was a shortstop, and he knew he was just about finished as a ball player, but he wasn’t about to give up his position to some interloper written about in the local paper as his replacement.

     Gehringer knew that helping me meant helping the ball club, and the ball club for years had been his life’s blood, and it was obvious he was hurting the ball club, because he could no longer hit or cover any ground. The team knew it, he knew it, everybody in the league knew it, and finally, in ’42, they kept him on the roster mostly as a pinch hitter, for the fans; and then one of the writers who got a thrill out of making somebody miserable wrote a column with headlines in the Detroit paper saying I, Murray Franklin, was taking over his position.

     He never said a word to me that day in the clubhouse. When I took batting practice there was already a crowd around the dugout booing my every swing, and during infield it was the same: boos and personal insults. And when the game started and I was announced as the secondbaseman, the entire packed house booed me, and they kept right on booing me when I ran on the filed. And when I ran off the field at the end of the first inning, a bunch of wolves near our dugout dumped garbage on me, coat hangers, corn cobs, filthy rancid stuff, and they cussed me and insulted me like I’d murdered Gehringer, telling me I’d never hold his jockstrap, and Gehringer sat in the dugout and never said a word or looked at me, and the booing and insults didn’t stop until I pulled a single into left field.

     But then it started all over again. God forbid I booted one! It felt like every eye in the stadium was on me, hoping I’d boot one, so they could run me out of town, and for a while the writers kept comparing me to Charlie, and the fans kept right on booing me, so I was relieved to go on the road and away from those Detroit fans. As for Gehringer, he sat the bench all year, never warmed up to me, never offered any advice or encouragement, and I never held it against him, because that was the nature of the dog-eat-dog times—you didn’t want anybody taking your place and you never felt secure. He was a proud man, a legend. He’d been so great, and it couldn’t have been easy to see somebody else playing a position he’d held down for 20 years.

     (Next Sunday installment: “An Act of Blatant Cowardice.”)