RetroSimba

The world changed for Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Rip Sewell on Dec. 7, 1941, but not for the obvious reason the date suggests.

Sewell went hunting with a group in Florida’s Ocala National Forest on that day, the last of deer season.

“I was walking down the fire lane,” Sewell recalled to the Tampa Tribune. “It was a path as wide as your living room, but one of those fellows was crouched down in the scrub pines, heard something, turned and fired his shotgun at it.”

Sewell was 30 feet away when two loads of buckshot from the double-barreled gun struck him in the legs and feet. The impact caused Sewell to turn a complete backwards somersault. The big toe was shot off his right foot. The blast “shattered every nerve in my legs,” he told the Tampa Tribune.

When the shooter and others reached him, they thought “I was dead,” Sewell said to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

He was taken to a hospital, where a nurse told the hunters she thought it was too late to save Sewell’s life. He almost bled to death, the Tampa Tribune reported.

In the book “Baseball When the Grass Was Real,” Sewell said to author Donald Honig, “That shot tore holes in me as big as marbles.”

In the hospital, they “managed to dig out 15 of the 18 buckshot slugs,” Sewell told the New York Times. “Now I’m able to understand how a deer must feel.”

Four months after the accident, Sewell was the starting pitcher for the Pirates in their 1942 home opener against the Cardinals.

Twisty travels

Sewell was from Decatur, Ala. His father was a streetcar conductor there, then became a boxcar builder for the L&N Railroad, Sewell told the Tampa Tribune.

Enrolled at Vanderbilt on a football scholarship, Sewell majored in mechanical engineering, “but I soon came to realize I wasn’t going to make it as a mechanical engineer,” he told author Donald Honig.

He left school, took a job at a DuPont rayon plant in Tennessee and played semipro baseball. A friend helped him get a minor-league contract. A right-hander, Sewell had 17 wins for the Raleigh (N.C.) Capitals in 1931.

The Detroit Tigers brought Sewell, 25, to the majors in June 1932. “When I went into the clubhouse and saw the name ‘Sewell’ on my locker, I was in shock,” he told the Tampa Tribune. “I was in the big leagues. I looked at the locker next to me, and there was Charlie Gehringer getting ready to play second base. It was the greatest thrill in my life.”

In his first appearance, a relief stint against the Athletics, Sewell retired Mickey Cochrane and Al Simmons, then gave up a home run to another future Hall of Famer, Jimmie Foxx. Boxscore

A month later Sewell was back in the minors. He wouldn’t return to the big leagues until six years later with the 1938 Pirates.

Quite a comeback

After the 1941 shooting, “I had to learn to walk all over again,” Sewell said to author Donald Honig.

On the pitching mound, “The injury forced him to alter his delivery because he could no longer drive off the foot as he had,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

Sewell developed a motion like he was walking toward the batter and learned to throw a slider to compensate for reduced velocity on his fastball.

On April 17, 1942, his first regular-season appearance since the shooting, Sewell pitched a complete game and beat the Cardinals, limiting them to two runs, in the Pirates’ home opener. Boxscore

Sewell went on to win 17, including five shutouts, for the 1942 Pirates.

Perhaps the batter who hit best against Sewell was the Cardinals’ Stan Musial. His first-big-league home run came against Sewell in 1941 and his first big-league grand slam was hit against him a year later. Boxscore and Boxscore

Specialty pitch

Working on his revised pitching motion in practice sessions, Sewell discovered he could throw a pitch about 25 feet high and make it drop across the strike zone.

“I’d been fooling around with the pitch in the bullpen and Al Lopez, our catcher, kept egging me on to try it in a game,” Sewell recalled to Joe Falls of the Detroit Free Press.

He unveiled the pitch in a 1943 spring training game against the Tigers. “I was working three innings this day and I had two out in my last inning and Dick Wakefield was the batter,” Sewell said to Falls. “I decided, well, what the heck, I’ll give it a try.”

As Falls described it, “The pitch went almost straight into the air like a kid losing his balloon at the circus.”

Wakefield swung from the heels and missed the pitch by at least two feet.

After the game, reporters asked Sewell what kind of pitch he threw Wakefield. Seated nearby, Sewell’s teammate, Maurice Van Robays, piped up and said, “It’s an eephus pitch.”

“What’s an eephus?”

“It ain’t nothing,” replied Van Robays, “and that’s what that pitch is _ nothing.”

Also known as the blooper, the dew drop, the parachute, the rainbow and the balloon, the pitch was used by Sewell for the rest of his career.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Joe Browne described it as “the craziest pitch in the history of baseball _ and one of the most effective.”

In the book “Baseball When the Grass Was Real,” Sewell said, “I was the only pitcher to pitch off of the tip of his toes, and that’s the only way you can throw the blooper. It’s got to be thrown straight overhand. I was able to get a terrific backspin on the ball by holding onto the seam and flipping it off of three fingers. The backspin held it on its line of flight to the plate. So that ball was going slow but spinning fast. Fun to watch, easy to catch, but tough to hit.”

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the blooper “goes through the strike zone at an angle new and strange to the batters. It is dropping sharply and to meet it head-on the hitter would have to swing almost directly upward.”

Using the same motion as his fastball, Sewell threw the blooper pitch up to 15 times a game, usually when ahead in the count and not with a runner on base. He told the Free Press he could get it over the plate six out of 10 tries.

Most batters hated the eephus pitch. According to The Sporting News, the Cardinals’ Whitey Kurowski “spat tobacco juice at the ball when Sewell threw him the blooper,” and the Reds’ Eddie Miller one time “grabbed the pitched ball on its downward flight and threw it back to Sewell.”

“Anytime I’ve got a batter looking for the eephus, I’ve got him where I want him,” Sewell told the Free Press. “He’s duck soup then for a fastball.”

Nobody in the National League hit the eephus pitch for a home run, but Stan Musial came close.

On Sept. 8, 1943, at St. Louis, Musial hit two home runs against Sewell. None was off the eephus pitch. In the eighth inning, Sewell threw the blooper and Musial hit it squarely but pulled it just a bit too much and the ball “crashed into the seats in the upper deck of the right field stands, above the pavilion roof, but foul by a few feet,” the Post-Dispatch reported. Boxscore

According to Bob Broeg of the Post-Dispatch, the longest fair ball hit off Sewell’s blooper pitch in a regular-season game was a triple Musial ripped to the far reaches of right field at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field in 1944. Boxscore

For his career, Musial batted .492 versus Sewell and had five home runs among the 31 hits.

Show stopper

Sewell was a 21-game winner for the Pirates in 1943 (when he allowed a mere six home runs in 265.1 innings) and again in 1944.

In May 1946, he suffered a mild stroke in the Pirates’ clubhouse, The Sporting News reported, but kept pitching that season.

At the 1946 All-Star-Game in Boston’s Fenway Park, the American League was ahead, 8-0, when National League manager Charlie Grimm sent Sewell in to pitch with instructions to “throw that blooper pitch and see if you can wake up this crowd,” the Associated Press reported.

With two on and two outs, Ted Williams came to the plate. Sewell threw the blooper and Williams hit it foul. Another blooper landed outside the strike zone. Then Sewell surprised Williams with a fastball that was taken for strike two.

Sewell came back with a pitch he described as a “Sunday Super Dooper Blooper.”

“It was a good one,” Sewell said to author Donald Honig. “Dropping right down the chute for a strike. He took a couple of steps up on it _ which was the right way to attack that pitch, incidentally _ and he hit it right out of there. I mean, he hit it.”

The ball carried over the fence in right for the only homer hit off Sewell’s blooper. Boxscore and Video

That year, using All-Star Game revenue, Sewell and Cardinals shortstop Marty Marion “worked out the framework of a plan that was to lead to the establishment of baseball’s player pension fund,” The Sporting News reported.

Sewell’s career record in the majors is 143-97. He was superb against the Cubs (36-19, 2.84 ERA) and not so good versus the Cardinals (9-19, 4.85).

According to The Sporting News, “the consequences of Sewell’s (1941) hunting accident forced doctors to amputate both his legs below the knees in 1973 because of life-threatening circulatory problems.”

A pretty good pitcher, Hugh Casey often got cuffed by the Cardinals. Off the field, as Ernest Hemingway learned, he was no punching bag.

In the 1940s, the Cardinals (four) and Dodgers (three) won seven of the 10 National League pennants that decade. Casey was a prominent pitcher on the Dodgers championship clubs in 1941 (14 wins, seven saves) and 1947 (10 wins, 18 saves).

Against the Cardinals, though, he could look like a guy tossing batting practice. Twice, they clobbered 15 hits in a game against Casey. In one of those, he gave up five homers and 13 runs in seven innings.

Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis gave him nightmares. Casey’s ERA in 28 games there against the Cardinals was 6.03. The career batting averages of some prominent Cardinals against Casey _ Stan Musial (.529), Johnny Mize (.447), Joe Medwick (.429), Red Schoendienst (.400) _ helped get them elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Come to Papa

In 1942, for the second spring in a row, the Dodgers held their training camp in Havana, the capital of Cuba. Novelist Ernest Hemingway was a resident and got to know the ballplayers.

“He used to hang around the Dodgers in the lobby of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba,” broadcaster Red Barber wrote in a column for the New York Times.

In the book “Baseball: When the Grass Was Real,” Dodgers second baseman Billy Herman told author Donald Honig about a “night I’ll never forget” at Hemingway’s Havana house.

“Hemingway took a lot of pride in all this manly stuff, guns and boozing and fighting, things like that,” Herman said to Honig. “He was a big, brawny man, and when he’d had a few drinks, he got mean, real mean.”

Hemingway and his wife, Martha Gellhorn Hemingway (a journalist who was born and raised in St. Louis and was best known for her work as a war correspondent on the front lines), belonged to The Club de Cazadores del Cerro (Hunter Club of the Hills), a gun club that held an international trap and live pigeon shoot.

“So he invited (Dodgers players) Hugh Casey, Larry French, Augie Galan and myself out to the gun club,” Billy Herman said. “Believe me, this was no Coney Island shooting gallery. It was a real fancy place. You had a guy with a portable bar following you around. You’d get up, take your shots, and there’d be a drink ready for you. This went on from three o’clock in the afternoon until dark.”

Then Hemingway brought the players to his house.

“He took us into a huge dining room-living room combination, with all terrazzo floors, and told us to make ourselves comfortable while he went and got the drinks,” Herman said. “He came back with an enormous silver tray, with all the bottles, the mixers, the glasses, the ice _ the whole works. He set it up on this little bookstand in the middle of the floor. And we started drinking.”

Herman said Hemingway gave each of the four players an autographed copy of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and talked with them about his experiences as a foreign correspondent.

“We had quite a bit to drink,” Herman recalled. “Then he laid out some food. After we ate, we had a few more drinks. It was getting pretty late now, and Mrs. Hemingway excused herself and went to bed. Hemingway was good and loaded by this time.”

Drunk and disorderly

Like Hemingway, Hugh Casey was a big drinker. Red Barber said, “Casey drank whiskey by the water glass _ without water.” Columnist Furman Bisher noted that Casey had cheeks “tanned by years of association with fine bourbon.”

Still telling war stories to his Dodgers guests, Hemingway “looked over at Casey, sort of sizing him up,” Herman recalled to Honig.

“You and I are about the same size,” Hemingway said to Casey. “We’d make a good match. I’ve got some boxing gloves. Let’s just spar. Fool around a little bit.”

According to Herman, Casey grinned and shrugged. Hemingway got the boxing gloves, put on a pair and gave the others to Casey.

“As Casey was pulling his gloves on, Hemingway hauled off and belted him,” Herman said. “He hit him hard. He knocked Casey into that bookstand and there goes the tray with all the booze and glasses smashing over the terrazzo floor.”

Hemingway’s wife came running into the room. According to Herman, she looked at the mess on the floor and went back to bed.

“Casey didn’t say anything about the sneak punch,” Herman said. “He got up and finished putting his gloves on. Then they started sparring. They were moving back and forth across the broken glass. Boom. Casey starts hitting him. And hitting him. Then Casey started knocking him down. Hemingway didn’t like that at all.

“Then Casey belted him across some furniture and there was another crash as Hemingway took a lamp and table down with him. The wife came running out, and Hemingway told her it was all right, that it was all in fun. She went away.”

Casey knocked down Hemingway some more. “Finally he got up this one time, made a feint with his left, and kicked Casey in the balls,” Herman said. “That’s when we figured it had gone far enough. We made them take the gloves off.”

Hemingway had his chauffeur drive the players back to their hotel.

“The next day, Hemingway’s wife brought him down to the ballpark,” Herman said. “You never saw a man so embarrassed, so ashamed. He apologized to everybody.”

(Years later, according to New York sports reporter and raconteur Tom Meany, Yankees catcher Yogi Berra was introduced to Hemingway at Toots Shor’s restaurant. After Hemingway departed, Meany asked Berra, “What did you think of him?” Berra said, “He’s quite a character. What does he do?” Meany replied, “He’s a writer.” Yogi said, “Yeah? What paper?”) 

Food for thought

In July 1942, four months after the incident with Hemingway, Stan Musial smashed a pitch straight at Casey “and almost bore a hole through his ample midriff,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported. As Casey tried to protect himself, the ball cracked the little finger of his pitching hand and he was sidelined for three weeks. The Cardinals, eight games behind the first-place Dodgers when Casey got injured, went on to win the pennant. Boxscore

After a three-year stint in the Navy, Casey returned to the Dodgers in 1946. He opened a restaurant in Brooklyn, Hugh Casey’s Steak and Chop House, at 600 Flatbush Avenue in the shadow of Ebbets Field.

Long and narrow with soft lighting, cozy booths and a 30-foot mirrored bar at the front, the restaurant was open from noon to 4 a.m, The Sporting News reported. Casey and his wife resided in an upstairs apartment.

Casey “takes great pride in his steaks and chops, condescends to serve fish on Fridays and gets a brisk trade from the neighborhood,” The Sporting News noted. “During the baseball season, the players from the clubs visiting Ebbets Field show up in droves.”

The restaurant’s walls were covered with photos of Dodgers players, including Jackie Robinson. A photo of Casey hung over the cash register. “Right there watching the money,” he told The Sporting News.

Multiple tragedies

On May 24, 1947, a car driven by Casey struck and killed a blind man on Fifth Avenue, near Seventh Street, in Brooklyn at about 11 p.m., the New York Times reported. The victim, 62, was being led across the street by his sister after they had exited a trolley car.

No charges were brought by police after witnesses told them the accident appeared to have been unavoidable, the New York Daily News reported.

Five months later, in the 1947 World Series against the Yankees, the Dodgers won three times. Casey (two wins and a save) had a hand in all three.

He pitched his last game in the majors for the 1949 Yankees and finished with a 75-42 career mark (8-11 against the Cardinals) and 54 saves.

In December 1950, a paternity suit ruling declared Casey the father of a son born out of wedlock to a 25-year-old Brooklyn woman.

Seven months later, on July 3, 1951, Casey, 37, sat on the edge of a bed in an Atlanta hotel room, holding a shotgun to his neck, and telephoned his estranged wife, Kathleen. According to the Associated Press, Casey told her, “I can’t eat or sleep since going through all the embarrassment.”

For 15 minutes, she pleaded with him to put down the gun, the Associated Press reported. Then he killed himself with a shotgun blast while his wife listened. According to the Associated Press, the shot also was heard by Casey’s friend, Gordon McNabb, who had hurried to the hotel after getting an earlier call from Casey telling him of his suicide plan. McNabb was in the corridor outside the room when the shot was fired.

On July 2, 1961, almost 10 years to the day of Casey’s death, Ernest Hemingway, 61, used a shotgun to commit suicide.