The baseball world will be reeling for quite a while following the death of Angels rookie pitcher Nick Adenhart, who was one of three people killed after their vehicle was struck by a van Thursday.
Adenhart's death, unfortunately, is the latest in a long line of tragedies that have claimed the lives of active major-leaguers. Here as some that I remember occurring over the past few decades:
Josh Hancock, P, Cardinals, April 29, 2007. Hancock was 29 when he died in an auto accident in St. Louis. He compiled a 9-7 record in 102 games, most of them in relief, over six seasons.
Cory Lidle, P, Yankees, Oct. 11, 2006. The plane Lidle was flying crashed into a building in Manhattan during the League Championship Series, after his team had been eliminated from the playoffs. Lidle, 34, posted an 82-72 record in nine major-league seasons.
Lidle's father learned of his son's death on television.
Darryl Kile, P, Cardinals, June 22, 2002. Kile, 33, was found dead of a heart attack in his hotel room prior to a scheduled game in Chicago. He had won 36 games for the Cardinals during the previous two seasons. He won 133 games, including 19 in 1997 and 20 in 2000. In both those seasons, he finished fifth in Cy Young Award balloting.
Steve Olin and Tim Crews, P, Indians, March 22, 1993. Olin and Crews were joined by teammate Bob Ojeda on a Florida spring-training speedboat outing just before opening day. Their boat struck a pier in Little Lake Nellie. Olin died at the site, and Crews died at a hospital in Orlando.
Olin, 27, a submarine-style pitcher, saved 17 games after the 1991 All-Star break for a bad team, and followed that up by saving 29 games for a team that wasn't much better.
Crews had signed with the Indians in January 1992 after spending six seasons with the Dodgers. He was 11 days shy of his 32nd birthday at the time of his death.
Thurman Munson, C, Yankees, Aug. 2, 1979. The team captain was piloting an airplane that went down in Canton, Ohio. He was 32. Munson was the first catcher in American League history to win the Cy Young Award (1970) and followed that up with the Most Valuable Player award in 1976. At the time of his death, he probably had been best known besides his success on diamond for his running feud with teammate Reggie Jackson.
Despite a stellar career for a high-profile team, Munson has not received serious consideration for the Hall of Fame.
Lyman Bostock, OF, Angels, Sept. 23, 1978. Bostock was in the wrong place at the wrong time: He was visiting his uncle, Thomas Turner, in Gary, Ind., and they went to visit Joan Hawkins, a woman whom Bostock had tutored as a teenager, but had not seen for several years. After the visit, Turner agreed to give Hawkins and her sister, Barbara Smith, a ride to their cousin's house. Smith had been living with Hawkins while estranged from her husband, Leonard Smith.
As Turner's vehicle was stopped at a traffic signal, Smith's car pulled up alongside. Smith leaned out of his vehicle and fired a shotgun into the back seat of Turner's car. The blast struck Bostock in the right temple. He died two hours later at a Gary hospital, at age 27.
A new home
7 years ago
Of course, Crews was responsible for his own death, as I recall. I believe he was drunk while driving the speedboat.
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There were some really bizarre deaths in the early days of professional baseball. Ed Delahanty, who was a major star at the turn of the century, was swept to his death over Niagara Falls in 1903 after being kicked off a train for being drunk and disorderly. And in 1935, Len Koenecke, I believe of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher during a scuffle with the crew of a plane he had chartered.
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Of the individuals cited all but Adenhart, Bostock and Kile played a part in their on demise. If Hancock, Lidle, Crews, Olin and Munson would have used better judgment they all could be alive today.
ReplyDeleteJosh Hancock was driving while intoxicated and struck a parked vehicle. Hancock’s blood-alcohol level was nearly double the legal limit in Missouri. Police also found 10.95 grams of marijuana along with a glass smoking pipe in his vehicle.
The National Transportation Safety Board determined that Cory Lidle was operating an aircraft with inadequate planning, judgment, and airmanship; in other words he was flying a plane that he shouldn’t have been and performing maneuvers in an area that he shouldn’t have been.
Tim Crews was driving the boat that killed both Crews and Steve Olin. Crews was legally drunk at the time when he drove the boat into a pier.
The National Transportation Safety Board determined that Thurman Munson’s failure to recognize the need for, and to take action to maintain, sufficient airspeed to prevent a stall into the ground during an attempted landing. Munson failed to recognize the need for timely and sufficient power application to prevent the stall during an approach conducted inadvertently without flaps extended. Contributing to the Munson’s inability to recognize the problem and to take proper action was his failure to use the appropriate checklist, and his nonstandard pattern procedures which resulted in an abnormal approach profile. In other words Munson was operating an aircraft he had no idea how to or at least had insufficient training in.
Good points about judgment, and good research, particularly the Len Koenecke reference! Yes, he played for the Dodgers, whose manager at the time was Casey Stengel.
ReplyDeleteAnother bizarre death in the early '30 was of Ed Morris, a pitcher for the Red Sox, who was stabbed to death at a fish fry.
And if you go way back, Charles "Chick" Stahl, player-manager of the Bostom Pilgrims (later Red Sox), committed suicide during spring training in 1907 by drinking carbolic acid. Two years later, Harry Pulliam, National League president, shot himself to death in his room at the New York Athletic Club.
Delahanty's death is the centerpiece of an excellent book, "July 2, 1903: The Mysterious Death of Hall-Of-Famer Big Ed Delahanty" by Mike Sowell. His research paints an excellent picture of what Major League Baseball was like around the turn of the last century.
Has anyone checked John Russell's office for carbolic acid? I'll check out the Delahanty book. Thanks.
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Found more on Ed Morris on the New York Daily News Web site. No wonder somebody stabbed him. Peanuts are sacred down there. Brant
ReplyDelete"Big Ed Morris had one big problem," Jerry Fischer, an amateur Florida historian who has researched the pitcher's life, told the Justice Story. "He liked to drink."
And that bugaboo revealed itself once again at his going-away fish fry in 1932.
Six men attended the party, including Morris, Joe Nolan and Joe White, who owned a filling station in Brewton, Ala. The men caught a nice stringer of catfish and fried them up on a campfire while also boiling a pot of peanuts.
Late in the day, after plenty of 100-proof lubrication, Morris pulled one of his country stunts.
"The old-timers tell me that the boys were enjoying themselves around the campfire when Big Ed stood up and urinated in the peanut pot," said Fischer. "Morris thought it was funny, but the other fellas didn't."
Nolan and Morris scuffled, but White stepped between them, playing peacemaker.
Tempers subsided temporarily, but the atmosphere turned sour as the men sat around the campfire.
"Morris must have felt like he'd been put down," said Fischer. "Being the he-man that he was, he was not going to stand for it."
He suddenly lunged across the fire and knocked White off his seat, then pummeled him as he lay on the ground. White grasped a knife sheathed on his hip and twice thrust it into Morris' chest.
The big pitcher is said to have cursed his buddies and waded across the creek to his car, which he drove to a hospital in nearby Century, Fla.
The initial prognosis was promising, even though the knife had narrowly missed the athlete's heart. But complications set in, and Morris died two days after the fish fry.
Never heard that about Morris before! The stuff I've read came from a time when details like the urine in the peanut pot weren't brought out in print, apparently.
ReplyDeleteGetting back to Len Koenecke, I have read speculation that he was making "advances" to one of the crew, and that led to having his head bashed in by a fire extinguisher.
That don't fly. ;-)
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