"Uniform measuring day," Jim Bouton wrote, dated March 3, 1969, the only spring training of the Seattle Pilots, and the only one you would read about in Bouton's seminal Ball Four. "This is always a waste. They measure everybody carefully and the uniforms arrive three sizes too big. Part of the reason is that everybody is wearing tight-fitting uniforms these days. (Joe) Pepitone refuses to take the field if his uniform isn't skintight. Phil Linz used to say that he didn't know why, but he could run faster in tight pants. And I understand that Dick Stuart, old Dr. Strangeglove, would smooth his uniform carefully, adjust his cap, tighten his belt, and say, 'I add 20 points to my average if I know I look bitchin' out there."
As if to prove conclusively that looks aren't everything, Dick Stuart's average wouldn't have been helped if he had had Christian Dior himself as a personal fashion consultant. (For the record, his lifetime batting average was .264.) As a matter of fact, Stuart probably would have asked where to sign, if it could have been arranged for Dior to serve that way. Consider this story, from Stuart's days with the Boston Red Sox, with Jim Bouton again the narrator, on 14 March 1969:
"It was Dick Stuart-story day today, and this one was about the time Johnny Pesky was managing the Red Sox and Stuart was playing for him and showing up late for a lot of things. For some reason this upset Pesky, so he called a meeting to talk about MORALE. Stuart was late for it. In fact, he didn't show up until about half an hour before the game (three is considered about right) and he walked right into the middle of the meeting. All eyes were upon him as he opened the door to the clubhouse and, without missing a beat, opened his double-breasted jacket, paraded to the center of the room with his hips swinging, did a pirouette and said, 'And here he is nattily attired in a black suede jacket by Stanley Blacker, with blue velvetine pants and shoes by Florsheim. The handkerchief is by Christian Dior.' Everybody went nuts. Even Pesky had to laugh."
That's assuming that Pesky was laughing. Stuart's Red Sox teammate, the huge relief pitcher Dick Radatz, told another story (to Peter Golenbock, for Fenway: An Unexpurgated History of the Boston Red Sox), about another team meeting featuring a Stuart fashion break.
"...I can remember in New York, opening day, 1963," said Radatz, who still lives in New England and is said to get a huge kick when fans recognise and meet him, and ask to talk baseball with him. "We had been rained out the first two days, and they were going to play on the third day come hell or high water, just to get in one game of the series.
"Stuart lived in Connecticut at the time, and he came to the team meeting," the pitcher continued. "It was still raining. The field was covered, and Stuart walked in - I'll never forget it - with a beautiful burgundy blazer on, black pants, alligator shoes, looking like something right out of GQ. We were in the middle of a team meeting, and we were trying to figure out how to get Mickey Mantle out. Stuart stood in front of the clubhouse door and said, 'Here I am, boys, eat your hearts out'."
Pesky told Stuart to get into uniform and get with it, and as the team meeting concluded, Radatz continued, he announced his curfew policy. "For you fellows who haven't played for me before, it's going to cost you $500 if you're caught out after curfew the first time, $1,000 the second time, and so on."
Stuart - who apparently had a reputation as a bit of a night owl, during his previous seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates (including their 1960 World Champion, on which team Stuart split first base time with Rocky Nelson) - raised a hand, and Pesky acknowledged it. "Is that tax deductible?" Stuart asked. "And with that," Radatz said, "everybody fell off their stools in the clubhouse."
And those were a couple of the funnier stories. Some stories about Stuart, who died of cancer at 70 on 15 December, weren't exactly a laughing matter - except perhaps to Dr. Strangeglove himself and maybe a couple of teammates. Another Red Sox pitcher when Stuart joined the club was Gene Conley, somewhat famous as a two-sport talent (he played basketball with the Boston Celtics as well as baseball with the Red Sox) and mostly famous for an incident a couple of seasons earlier, when he gave in to a soul-wrenching depression and wandered off the team bus, in a New York traffic jam, to use a men's room.and wound up at then-Idlewild Airport bound, apparently, for Israel. Conley recalled Stuart before a game, telling him the white shirts in the crowd behind third baseman Frank Malzone were a little too voluminous. Stuart asked Conley to be careful throwing over to first, because he couldn't see the ball too good.
"Here I was," Conley recalled for Golenbock, "my arm was bothering me, they're bringing in (the Yankees) with the wind blowing out, and this guy was telling me that if somebody gets on base don't throw the ball over! He's telling me he might miss the ball if I throw it! I thought, 'Holy shit, get over there and just hide behind the bag."
Another time, Red Sox infielders Ed Bressoud and Chuck Schilling converged on a huge popup that was probably a better chance for Stuart as it drifted more toward first base. Stuart didn't budge, but Bressoud and Schilling came to it diving and collided, leaving the ball to hit the ground and become a two-run double. Said Stuart: "God, did you guys look funny."
It wasn't funny, though, when Stuart in 1963 went down to the wire with Harmon Killebrew of the Minnesota Twins in the American League's home run race. The Twins and the Red Sox squared off in Fenway Park to finish the season, with Dr. Strangeglove and the inappropriately nicknamed Killer (he was gentle a man as he was explosive as a power hitter) tied for the lead at 40 bombs. When the three games were finished, Killebrew had popped five over the fences and Stuart had gone yard twice. "Hell," Stuart told the papers afterward, "Killebrew had a distinct advantage. If I could have hit against our pitching staff, I'd have hit ten."
"That sat real well with the pitching staff," Radatz remembered. "But that's how Stuart was." So Stuart settled for a consolation prize: he ended up leading the league in runs batted in, extra base hits and total bases that season (1963 was his career year), the only time he ever led his league in any positive offencive categories.
The odd thing of it seems to be that even the teammates who felt burned at the time didn't seem to remember the incidents with any kind of real bile. On the other hand, one notes another Red Sox pitcher, Earl Wilson, later a star for a few seasons with the Detroit Tigers, wasn't consulted. Perhaps that is because Wilson might have thought the most polite thing to do would be to hang up on his inquirer, lest he kill him.
Bouton remembered a game between the Yankees and the Red Sox in Boston in which Stuart got under Wilson's skin on the first pitch of the game, a foul pop between home and first, with Wilson responsible for calling who should try the catch. "And he made a tragic mistake," Bouton wrote. "He called Stuart. The ball dropped to the ground in front of him with a sickening thud." On the next pitch, Wilson induced another infield pop in fair territory. "Earl ran over screaming at the top of his lungs, 'I got it! I got it!' He wasn't taking any chances." Fat lot of good that did him: Stuart bounded over and plowed into Wilson, spiking him in the bargain, with the ball loose and the hitter getting two bases out of it.
"Now, Wilson's got a spiked foot and a man on second and he's steaming mad," Bouton continued. "The next pitch is a ground ball on the first base line and Earl runs over, picks it up, whirls to throw to first and Stuart isn't on the bag. First and third. Wilson slammed his glove down and walked toward the dugout like he was quitting right there, but he thought better of it and came back to the game. And Stuart? Stuart was his usual jovial self. He knew he had bad hands and there was nothing he could do about it."
"Dick's biggest problem," remembered his Pittsburgh Pirate teammate, shortstop Dick Groat, who won the National League's Most Valuable Player award after the Pirates nailed the 1960 Series, "was his lack of concentration. Thinking about hitting instead of playing defence."
Stuart actually went three consecutive days without committing an error. "Of course," he remembered to the Boston Globe in 1982, "that came about because the Sox had three straight rainouts."
He also hit more home runs than Babe Ruth and Roger Maris in a single season: 66, in 1956. The small detail: He did it for a Class-A minor league team (Lincoln, Nebraska, in the Western League).
Bill James, in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, ranks Stuart as perhaps the worst percentage player who ever played major league baseball. ("We should point out," James continues, "that a) there were worse percentage players than Dick Stuart but they were so bad they couldn't play in the majors, and b) Stuart only got to play a few years because he could flat out hit.") He also ranks Stuart as number five on the all time list of players whose home run hitting is the highest percentage of their career value - behind (from numbers four to one) Tony Armas, Pete Incaviglia, Rob Deer, Cecil Fielder, and Dave Kingman.
Stuart was oddly run-productive - his average runs produced per 162 games was 146, seven better than Kingman and nine better than Hall of Famer Willie McCovey. About all Stuart and McCovey had in common was they both played major league ball, and they both played first base while hitting with ferocious power. Then and there the similarities end.
And Stuart knew it.
You probably can't really knock a guy who did what he could, with what little he had and somehow found a way to have fun doing it. Maybe he rankled his teammates a good many times, but I don't know that any of them, perhaps even including Earl Wilson, ever really wanted to kill him. In this world, in too many instances, that may be achievement enough. And Stuart does seem mostly to have been the jovial sort.
At least once in his life he knocked on the door of a World Series triumph to remember. He came out on deck in the bottom of the ninth, in the seventh game of the 1960 classic, watching the Yankees' Ralph Terry work to Pirate second baseman Bill Mazeroski, the best defencive player in the history of the game, thus far, with the game tied at 9.
Stuart savoured every minute as he watched Mazeroski face Terry. "I was kneeling in the on-deck circle thinking I was going to be the hero," he remembered. Then Mazeroski caught all of a Terry pitch and jerked it uncharacteristically over the ivy-covered Forbes Field left field wall for game, set, and Series.
"And all of a sudden," Stuart continued, "I was out on the field jumping around."
Not everyone's destiny is to soar like an eagle for even one hour, but not everyone who plays the turkey learns to laugh at himself, either.
» Jeff Kallman is a journalist living in Huntington Beach, California. He writes a Webzine, The Polo Grounds: A Calm Review of Baseball.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jeff Kallman. Posted February 17, 2003.
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