Mickey Owen played 13 seasons in the majors. In 1949 he was almost enticed to come to Galt, Ontario to become the playing-coach of the Senior Intercounty Terriers.
In the fall of 1948 Galt Terrier president Gus Murray was in correspondence with former Brooklyn Dodger catcher Mickey Owen. Murray wanted to sign Owen to come to Galt for the 1949 Intercounty baseball season.
Owen had been barnstorming the previous season after being banned for life from the majors for having played in the outlawed Mexican League in 1946.
There had been a change in focus for the Terriers after a dismal effort in 1948 and the objective was to hire some big-name imports and bring fans back to the park.
The crew-cut Murray, in his first year as Terrier president, believed in strength down the middle. In his view, it all began with a quality catcher who could run the team. Owen was the man.
But Owen, despite showing an early interest in coming to Ontario, still harbored hopes of playing in the majors again. By the late fall of 1948, there appeared to be hope that he just might be able to do so.
In a letter he wrote to Murray that November, he thanked him for the offer, but politely declined.
Murray was disappointed at Owen's reply, but undeterred. He wrote back, extolling Galt's virtues. The pay was good, almost equivalent to what a major leaguer would take home, plus there was the guarantee of a rent-free house for the season.
Again Owen declined. As late as February 1949, with the season less than four months away, local newspapers reported that the job was Owen's if he wanted it. The story was picked up by Canadian Press and then appeared in U.S. newspapers. Owen, after all, was a big name; people were interested in his activities.
The news that a semi-pro team in Canada was courting Owen didn't escape sportswriter Ben Gould of the Brooklyn Eagle. On February 28, Gould wrote to Murray in Galt: "A few days ago I read that your team had been offering the job of manager to Mickey Owen. Inasmuch as I'd like to write an article on Mickey, I wonder if anything new has come up on the subject? Will you please advise? I'd also appreciate it if you would send me Mickey's home address."
Murray didn't mind obliging Gould. He tried one last time with Owen, to no avail. Former Terrier player George Brown would be offered the job before Tom Padden, who'd been up with the Pirates in the majors for several years, accepted Murray's offer.
That spring he got a call to report to Brooklyn, the team which owned his major league rights. He had been removed from the ineligible list along with others after the league had been taken to court.
"I went up to Brooklyn for a week," Owen recalls, "but they had Campanella. They sold me to the Cubs."
He played three more years in Chicago and another in Boston before calling it quits. "I didn't exactly set the world on fire those three years," he admits.
Owen had 198 at-bats that season in the National League, and hit .273. He would wind up his career in 1953 when he saw action in 32 games for the Boston Red Sox.
Though he had a solid career in the majors, he is remembered for the dropped third strike in the 1941 World Series. Owen was Brooklyn's catcher, having been traded just that year -- his rookie season -- by the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Dodgers were playing the cross-town Yankees in Game 4.
It was a Sunday. The Dodgers were winning the game 4-3; they were in the bottom of the ninth inning and had two outs. All they had to do was get one more strikeout and the Series would be tied at two games apiece.
New York's Tommy Henrich had a full count. The Dodgers had fallen behind early 3-0 but in the bottom of the fourth inning, with two out, Owen, who reporters liked to describe as a Missouri farm boy, had walked followed by second baseman Pete Coscarart, and the two had scored to narrow New York's lead to 3-2.
Then 22-year-old Brooklyn rookie phenom Pete Reiser, coming off an amazing year in which he hit .343 and became the youngest batting champion in National League history, hit a monstrous home run the next inning -- it cleared the scoreboard at Ebbets Field and landed in Bedford Avenue -- to score Dixie Walker and put the Dodgers ahead.
Then, in the ninth inning, with the Dodgers holding a tenuous 4-3 lead, New York came down to their last out in Henrich.
Henrich's teammates used to call him Old Reliable because he was a clutch player.
Pitcher Hugh Casey had been brought in by Dodger manager Leo Durocher in the fifth. He had gone 14-11 that season and was control. He also had a natural sinker ball.
For three innings he did his job. "His curves broke with a fork like the jagged end of summer lightning," said Owen at the time.
In the ninth, the Yankees' Johnny Sturm grounded out, as did Red Rolfe.
Now it was down to Old Reliable, Henrich. It was 4:35 in the afternoon when Owen crouched and gave Casey the sign for a low inside curveball. Casey nodded, and wound up.
The pitch came and Henrich began to swing but then let up. It didn't matter. The umpire signalled strike three. The Dodger dugout started for Casey. Congratulations were in order. Members of the Yankees began to exit for the showers. Police began to barricade the players on the field from fans.
But the ball had glanced off Owen's mitt and was rolling fast on the dirt back to the stands. It was uncharacteristic of Owen. He'd made only three errors all season. Indeed, earlier that summer he'd set a National League record for consecutive games without an error.
He lunged after the ball as Henrich's teammates, now realizing what had happened, yelled for him to run to first. By the time Owen got his hands on the ball Henrich was stepping on the bag.
Next up was Joe DiMaggio. Brooklyn manager Durocher, shocked by the turn of events, failed to call a time out to calm down his battery.
DiMaggio singled to left. Then Charlie "King Kong" Keller hit a long ball that scored both DiMaggio and Henrich. Bill Dickie then walked before Joe Gordon doubled to score Dickie and Keller. The score was 7-4 for the Yankees.
In the Dodger half of the Pee Wee Reese, Dixie Walker and Pete Reiser were disposed of easily and the Dodgers had blown one of the biggest games in World Series history.
It would be 14 years before the Dodgers won Brooklyn's first, and last, World Series.
Owen blamed himself for the loss. "I don't mind being the goat," he said. "I'm just sorry for what I cost the other guys." Still, the Dodgers had hit only .182 in the Series. If they were intent on winning the thing, they would have had to do better than that.
Others were more charitable to Owens than Owens was to himself. Said Henrich, "That was a tough break for poor Mickey to get. I bet he feels like a nickel's worth of dog meat."
Some years later Casey admitted it had been an illegal spitball he had thrown, and not a curve.
The mail flooded in to Owen after the season. In all, some 5,000 letters of encouragement arrived.
"The missed third strike, instead of ruining my career, will make me a better catcher ... until the day I hang up my glove and mask forever," Owen wrote in a 1942 Collier's Magazine article.
Owen calls his stint in Mexico "the worst mistake of my life." He was 30, underpaid, and a bonafide star. Today he says "a lack of good brains was at work."
He was just getting out of the service -- he'd been in the Navy for a year -- before going to Mexico in '46. "I was a damn fool," he says. "The ball there was like Class AA minor league in the States at that time. Maybe not quite as fast as the American Association of the International League."
But there were some good players in Mexico. He recalls a great black Cuban pitcher, "as good as anybody I saw," whose name he has long since forgotten. "He was a power pitcher who could go at you with some stuff. And he was a good hitter."
As he talks the Cuban's last name comes back to him -- Amaletie. "He could have pitched in the big leagues and been a star."
But, like countless other black players, he was at his prime before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.
Owen's stint in Mexico came to an abrupt end one day when his team fired him as its manager. But they wanted and expected him to stay on as a player.
"I went home," Owen says. "I don't blame them for firing me as manager." But as far as he was concerned, he had been hired as playing manager; the two went together.
Home was Springfield, Missouri. In 1960 Owen founded the Mickey Owen Baseball School for Boys.
Born April 4, 1916 at Nixa, Missouri (close to Springfield), Mickey Owen was seemingly a ball player waiting to happen.
One of his earliest memories is of throwing stones at fence posts in the countryside around Nixa.
One day at lunchtime while his mother was home from school -- she taught at the local public school -- preparing lunch, Mrs. Owen's friend, another teacher by the name of Gussie Harris, and he went out for a short walk down a gravel road. Mickey was then only six or seven. "They didn't have blacktop roads back then," Owen recalls. "I used to walk with a handful of good-sized rocks and throw them at the fenceposts."
A rabbit ran across the road and into the field.
"Oh I love young rabbit," said Gussie Harris. "Do you think you can hit him?"
By then the rabbit was about 40 feet off and running. Owen threw and hit him clean behind the ears. The rabbit did a somersault from the impact, as Owen ran to retrieve him.
"Anyone who can throw like that is going to be in the major leagues some day," Ms. Harris said.
Owen smiled. He didn't know what the major leagues were.
"I used to pick off frogs at the pond," he says.
At school he would put on an exhibition for the other kids by throwing rocks over the two-story school house. "None of the other kids could do it," he says. But they tried.
Another kid had his rock come back down and hit one of the kids in the head. There was blood.
"The headmaster, Willoughby, was a big guy, about 6' 3", and he turned him over his elbow and paddled his backside."
Mrs. Owen then emerged from the school and saw Mickey. "Don't let it happen again," she said in no uncertain terms.
Owen and his mother -- he didn't see his father until he was 12 -- went to live in Los Angeles when he was in Grade 2 and stayed there, playing ball in sandlots and parks, until high school.
If Owen didn't know what the major leagues were when he picked off the rabbit for Gussie Harris, he knew when he was out in California. By then his arm was getting strong.
But everything he knew about throwing was self-taught. "No one ever told me how to throw a ball," he says.
Owen developed one of the strongest arms in the majors in the 1940s. "I wanted players to run on me," he said, "so I could throw them out."
Owen played with and against some of the greats. One was Dizzy Dean. "He was one of the best to ever walk out on the rubber," Owen says. "He's as good as they come when he was laying it back and throwing it in there."
Who was the best hitter?
There is no hesitation. "Ted Williams," he says. "He was the best hitter I ever played with. He was in a class with Ruth and himself" Owen says Williams career was never blemished by anything, even two stints of service in the air force. "He was in the prime of his career and spent five years away from the majors in two wars."
Had he continued playing ball he most certainly would have approached Ruth's then-record of 714 homers which was eventually broken by Hank Aaron.
The best all-round player he ever saw? Joe DiMaggio.
In 13 major league seasons Owen played in 1,209 games and hit .255 with a fielding average of .981. He hit just 14 home runs in his career, but one of his major-league records s a slugging one. He hit the first pinch-hit home run in an all-star game -- a record that can't be broken -- at the Polo Grounds in 1942. He is also one of only three people to hit a game-ending grand slam.
After his retirement from the majors he did some scouting, then, in 1960, Owen founded the Mickey Owen Baseball School for Boys in Missouri. "It's still running and it's probably the best school," he says, though he sold out several years ago.
He was County Sheriff of Greene County, Mo., from 1964 until 1980.
He was still spry at 80, working out "seriously" five days a week. He regarded retirement and old-age as "the best thing."
» David Menary is a former sports editor of the Cambridge Times.
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Posted September 24, 2001.
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