Eddie Waitkus
A bio of the man who inspired the book The Natural by Bernard Malamud which was later made into a movie in 1984.
Eddie Waitkus was a slick-fielding first baseman who in an 11-year big-league career for three teams batted a solid .285 and struck out only 204 times in 4,681 plate appearances. Although a fine ballplayer, he would today likely be little remembered but for what happened to him on June 14, 1949, in a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. That evening a young, obsessed female fan named Ruth Steinhagen lured Waitkus to her hotel room with a cryptic note and then shot him in the chest, critically wounding him.
The Waitkus shooting is said to have inspired Bernard Malamud to write his iconic baseball novel, The Natural, which he published in 1952 and which was later immortalized in the Robert Redford movie by the same name in 1984.
Waitkus managed to survive the shooting after enduring four operations, and returned to the major leagues in 1950, playing a key role in the Philadelphia Philles Whiz Kids’ rush to the National League pennant. But the story does not have a happy ending. Waitkus was never really able to recover emotionally from the shooting, and his post-baseball career was particularly difficult. He battled depression and alcoholism and endured a nervous breakdown before succumbing to cancer just after his 53rd birthday.
Eddie’s life was to be full of hardships and the first occurred when he was only fourteen. His mother was hospitalized with pneumonia and died just days later.
Despite the tragedy, Waitkus went on to become an honor student at Cambridge Latin High, where he studied foreign languages, was a star debater, and graduated sixth in a class of 600. When he was a sophomore he walked into a baseball practice with his trusty first baseman’s mitt, only to be told by the coach that the team already had a first baseman. Eddie asked the coach to at least let him take a few grounders and after he scooped up everything hit his way, was told to grab a bat. Waitkus proceeded to smack line drives all over the park and all of a sudden Latin High had a new first baseman.
By the time Waitkus graduated, he was a legend on the baseball field as well as in the classroom. He hit .600 his senior year, including a prodigious home-run blast that landed on the top of a three-story apartment building beyond the right-field fence. He was named to every All-Scholastic team in the Boston area in 1937 and that summer played in the semipro Suburban Twilight League. He considered accepting a scholarship to play baseball at either Harvard, Holy Cross, or Duke but playing for the Worumbo Indians of Lisbon Falls, Maine, in the fast Maine League during the summer of 1938 changed any college plans.
Waitkus played exceptionally well and became the top prospect in New England that summer. His club won the Maine championship and qualified for the National Baseball Congress tournament in Wichita, Kansas, where it won two games before being eliminated. Waitkus hit over .500 in Wichita and fielded flawlessly. After the young first baseman was named by major-league scouts to an All American semipro team, Boston sportswriter Fred Barry proved prescient when he wrote, “These big league ‘wise men’ viewed the left-handed batting and throwing of 19-year-old Waitkus and termed him a ‘natural.’”
Ralph Wheeler, the high-school sports editor for the Boston Herald, had close ties with the Chicago Cubs and arranged for Waitkus to work out for Cubs manager Gabby Hartnett on Chicago’s last trip to Boston to play the Bees. That led to a contract and a $2,500 bonus from the Cubs, who assigned him to the Moline Plow Boys of the Class-B Three-I League for the 1939 season.
That performance earned Waitkus a promotion to the Tulsa Oilers of the Class-A Texas League for 1940. He adjusted to the faster league quite well, batting .303 in 162 games and leading the league in hits with 192. Dizzy Dean, who was trying to rehab a sore arm, spent much of the summer with the Oilers and roomed with Waitkus when the team was on the road. While it would seem that the 30-year-old Southern country boy Dean and the 20-year-old kid from Boston would have little in common, they became fast friends. In fact, Dean became one of Waitkus’s biggest supporters.
The Cubs assigned Waitkus to the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League for 1942. This time he didn’t miss a beat stepping up to tougher competition and in 175 games and 766 plate appearances he batted .336 to finish near the top of the league in batting average. In fact, he led the league with 235 hits for the season.
One would normally expect that Waitkus would be back in Catalina Island with the Cubs in 1943. World War II, however, intervened, as it did for so many, and Eddie spent that spring in Army basic training in Fort Devens, Massachusetts.
Waitkus finished the war with 10 meritorious service awards, including four bronze stars and four overseas bars.
Eddie was 26 years old when he reported to Catalina Island for the Cubs’ 1946 spring training after 34 months in the service. The only problem was that the Cubs had a first baseman, Phil Cavarretta, who was coming off a batting championship (.355) and a National League Most Valuable Player Award. When Waitkus arrived, manager Charlie Grimm, also a former slick-fielding first baseman, told him to go to first and take some groundballs. For a full 15 minutes Grimm futilely tried to smash a ball past Waitkus, but could not. Before long, the question was not whether Eddie would make the team, but when and where the team would move Cavarretta to make room for him at first base.
Once the season began, Bill Nicholson, the Cubs’ right fielder, continued his slump from the previous year, and on April 25 manager Grimm benched Nicholson, moved Cavarretta to right field, and inserted Waitkus at first base. Batting sixth, Waitkus singled twice, doubled, and drove in two runs in his first game as a starter. Thereafter the job was his. By mid-June he was hitting .310 and fielding flawlessly. On June 23 Eddie got into the major-league record book when fellow rookie Marv Rickert and he hit back-to-back inside-the-park home runs in the Polo Grounds against the Giants. They were the first duo ever to accomplish the feat.
Now entrenched as the Cubs’ first baseman, Waitkus battled injuries early in 1947, but when he was in there he still hit for a solid average, typically batting second in the batting order. He slumped in late May and early June, dropping to .244, but steadily improved his average the rest of the year. He had a big day at the plate on September 14 with a triple and two singles against the Boston Braves. For the season, he finished at .292 in 130 games, third best on a team that slipped to sixth place with a 69-85 record.
The Cubs continued their downward slide in 1948, finishing in the National League basement with a 64-90 record. It was hard to fault Waitkus, however, as he turned in another solid season, batting .295 in 139 games. After the season the Cubs were on the trade market to try to resurrect the franchise, and found a willing partner in the sixth-place Philadelphia Phillies, who under new ownership were eager to turn their team into a contender. At the winter meetings in December, the two clubs announced a blockbuster trade with the Cubs sending Waitkus and pitcher Hank Borowy to the Phillies in exchange for pitchers Dutch Leonard and Walt Dubiel.
Rogers Hornsby, the outspoken former Cubs manager, was not so thrilled. According to the Rajah, “The Cubs have two real ballplayers — Andy Pafko and Eddie Waitkus. They can’t trade the best first baseman in the business.” But of course they did and, as it turned out, the Phillies got a key component of their Whiz Kids club that would win the 1950 National League pennant.
The slick-fielding Waitkus had an immediate impact on the longtime doormat Phillies in ’49 as the club flirted with the first division for much of the early season. By the first week of May, he was batting third in the order and hitting over .300. His teammates tabbed him “the Fred Astaire of first basemen,” and manager Eddie Sawyer compared him to George Sisler and Joe Kuhel, two of the top glove men of all time at first.
Waitkus is shot:
Waitkus continued to enjoy the nightlife while with the Phillies, particularly with his old Cubs teammates Meyer and Nicholson, who was his roommate on the road. On June 14 the Phillies had just begun a 15-day road trip and had defeated the Cubs at Wrigley Field that afternoon, 9-2 behind Meyer’s complete-game pitching. Waitkus was enjoying his best year in the big leagues, hitting .306 and leading in the balloting for the All-Star Game.
That evening Waitkus went out for dinner and drinks with Nicholson and Meyer, Russ’s fiancée, Mary, and Meyer’s parents, visiting from nearby Peru, Illinois. After dinner, Nicholson and Waitkus took a cab separate from Meyer back to the Edgewater Beach Hotel, where the Phillies were staying.
When they arrived, Eddie suggested that Nicholson go down to the Beachwalk to find Meyer and ask him to join them for a nightcap. In the meantime, a bellhop approached Waitkus and told him that he had a note from a girl in his mailbox at the front desk. Eddie retrieved the note and read it while walking through the lobby. The writer identified herself as Ruth Anne Burns and gave her room number as 1297-A. She wrote, “It’s extremely important that I see you as soon as possible. We’re not acquainted but I have something of importance to speak to you about. I think it would be to your advantage to let me explain it to you.” The note concluded by saying, “Please come soon. I won’t take much of your time.”
Waitkus returned to the front desk and asked who was registered in room 1297-A. The clerk told him that the registration was to a Ruth Anne Burns from Portland Street in Boston. That information made Waitkus a little uneasy, as he had grown up on Portland Street in East Cambridge. Eddie decided that he should find Nicholson and Meyer for that drink and joined them at a small table at the back of the Beachwalk. He showed his teammates the strange note and finally decided he should call on Ruth Anne Burns, thinking she might be a family acquaintance who was in need of help.
He first called the room, and it seemed to him that Ruth Anne may have been asleep. But she urged him to come up and at about 11:30 he knocked on her room door. Ruth Ann opened the door and bade him come in. Waitkus entered the room and walked past her in the tiny room and sat down in a small armchair by the window.
The girl, who was in reality 19-year-old Ruth Ann Steinhagen of Chicago, appeared from behind the door brandishing a .22-caliber rifle and said, “I have a surprise for you. You are not going to bother me anymore.”
Waitkus stiffened immediately and said, “What goes on here? Is this some kind of joke? What have I done?”
She answered by shooting Waitkus once in the abdomen. As Eddie slumped down he said over and over, “Oh baby, why did you do that?”
Steinhagen at first wasn’t convinced she’d shot Waitkus, but eventually stepped over Eddie, returned the gun to the closet, and called the front desk, saying that she had just shot a man in her room.
That call probably saved Waitkus’s life. He was near death when he was taken to the Illinois Masonic Hospital. The bullet had pierced a lung and was lodged near his spine. He would undergo two operations at Masonic before being transferred to Billings Memorial Hospital on the University of Chicago campus, where he had a third operation. There he developed a persistent fever and it was determined that he needed a fourth operation to remove the bullet.
After being indicted for attempted murder, Ruth Ann Steinhagen was declared mentally ill and committed to the Kankakee State Hospital. She had been obsessed with Waitkus since she first saw him play for the Cubs in April of 1947. Although she had never met him, she attended all the Cubs games and would wait for him to pass by outside the clubhouse after the games. Her room was a virtual shrine to Waitkus and she ultimately decided that if she couldn’t have him, nobody could.
A rapid recovery:
Waitkus’s recovery was near miraculous. He spent a month in the hospital before returning to Philadelphia by air on July 17, where 500 fans braved the pouring rain to greet him. By early August the Phillies were in their worst slump of the season, having lost five games in a row and 10 of 13. Waitkus was restless convalescing in his Philadelphia apartment and, accompanied by Babe Alexander of the Phillies’ front office, flew to Pittsburgh, where the Phillies were playing the Pirates. He walked unannounced into the Phillies clubhouse, where his teammates were shocked at how much weight he had lost. But his visit must have helped because the Phillies beat the Pirates and began playing better.
On August 19 the club had a “Welcome, Eddie Waitkus” night at Shibe Park, where Waitkus was greeted with a standing ovation from nearly 20,000 fans. He wore his Phillies uniform, although his jersey hung loosely from his frame, and received a new Dodge convertible, a television set, golf clubs, a full wardrobe including about 10 suits, a two-week vacation to Atlantic City, and many other gifts. Dick Sisler, who had replaced Waitkus at first base, presented a tearful Eddie with a gift from the team, a bronzed first baseman’s glove and two silver baseballs mounted on a velvet-covered plaque. “You put me on the spot on June 14,” Sisler said, “so I hope you have a speedy recovery and come back and take the job away from me.”
Waitkus’s recovery, while long and arduous, was nothing short of miraculous. He was in the Whiz Kids’ Opening Day lineup in 1950, playing first base and batting third against the Brooklyn Dodgers. For the day in the Phillies’ 9-1 win, Eddie was 3-for-5 with a run batted in. He went on to start all 154 games at first as the Phillies nosed out the Dodgers for their first pennant in 35 years.
Waitkus played a key role in the Phillies’ pennant-clinching victory over the Dodgers in Ebbets Field on the last day of the season, hitting a Texas League single in the top of the 10th, eventually scoring the winning run on Dick Sisler’s three-run homer, and then squeezing the final out, a popup from Tommy Brown, in the bottom of the 10th to clinch the pennant.
For the season he went to the plate 702 times, scored 102 runs, and hit a solid .284. He even garnered some votes for Most Valuable Player, finishing 24th, and won the Associated Press’s Comeback Player of the Year Award in a landslide.
Phillies manager Steve O’Neill, who had replaced Eddie Sawyer in June of 1952, batted Waitkus eighth in the batting order after the All-Star break, in spite of his solid average.Then, in February of 1953 the Phillies acquired Earl Torgeson from the Boston Braves, another left-handed first baseman who had twice hit more than 20 home runs in a season. It was clear that the Phillies wanted more pop from first base, even at the expense of defense. As a result, Eddie played only 59 games at the position. He was also 7-for-20 as a pinch hitter and batted .291 for the season.
The Phillies mailed Waitkus a contract for 1954 that included a substantial pay cut. Waitkus wrote “N.S.F.” on the contract, for “not sufficient funds,” and mailed it back. After rejecting a second contract offer, Waitkus finally signed for 1954 and reported to Clearwater. Manager O’Neill, however, did not play Waitkus in a single exhibition game that spring, much to Eddie’s disgruntlement. When he finally demanded to know why from Carpenter, he was told that he just been sold to the Baltimore Orioles.
The 34-year-old Waitkus was sad to leave the Phillies but hopeful of being able to play every day again with the Orioles. His main competition at first base was power-hitting Dick Kryhoski. As luck would have it, Kryhoski broke his wrist when hit by a pitch in a spring-training game just after Waitkus was purchased. As a result, Waitkus started the season playing regularly. He got off to a poor start, however, and was hitting only .170 in early May, prompting manager Jimmy Dykes to insert Kryhoski into the lineup upon his return.
Although Waitkus rarely complained about it, he was increasingly bothered by lower-back spasms, apparently related to adhesions from the surgery to remove the bullet. He began the 1955 season on the disabled list and thereafter played sparingly, appearing in only 38 games by late July. The Orioles under new manager Paul Richards were headed into a youth movement and on July 25 gave Waitkus his unconditional release.
Five days later the Phillies signed Waitkus to spell struggling rookie Marv Blaylock at first base. Waitkus joined his old club in Cincinnati and smacked a pinch-hit single in his first game back. He went on to play in 33 games for the Phillies in the last two months of the season, batting .280. On September 20 in Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, the 36-year-old Waitkus played his last major-league games as the Phillies lost a doubleheader to the Dodgers. In the fourth inning of the first game, Eddie smashed a home run over the billboards in right field off Don Newcombe to tie the score, 1-1. It was his second home run of the season and only the 24th of his career.
Life after baseball:
The Phillies released Waitkus in October and he decided to retire rather than try to hang on another year in the majors or play back in the Pacific Coast League. He obtained a job in marketing and sales with Eastern Freightways, a New Jersey-based trucking firm. He and his family, which now included daughter Ronni and son Ted, were soon relocated to Buffalo, New York. Without baseball, Waitkus’s drinking became more of a problem as did his depression, which he had battled since the shooting. Now he self-medicated his deepening depression with alcohol.
All of this took a toll on his family and in 1960 Carol took the kids and moved to Albany to be near her family. Eastern Freightways transferred him to Camden, New Jersey, and Waitkus continued his downward spiral. Finally, in late February 1961 he was admitted to the Veterans Hospital in Philadelphia with a nervous breakdown. He spent several days there, but apparently did not follow up on the prescribed counseling after his release.
Waitkus did not return to the trucking company, but instead took a job in sales at Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia. One of baseball’s sharpest dressers was now selling men’s clothing. By the time of a Whiz Kids’ reunion in 1963 Waitkus had moved to Waltham, Massachusetts, to live with his sister Stella and work selling sporting goods at the Grover Cronin department store.
The one real positive of Waitkus’s later years began in 1967 when he started working during the summers as a baseball coach and counselor at the Ted Williams Baseball Camp in Lakeville, about 45 minutes south of Boston. Waitkus connected with the campers, many of whom didn’t even know that he was a former big leaguer.
In the fall of 1971, Waitkus fractured his hip when he fell while installing storm windows on the second story of the house where he rented a room. Although he had quit drinking, he continued to be a heavy smoker. According to his son Ted, who attended the Ted Williams camp with his dad in the summers, “His Benson and Hedges Menthol 100s never left his side.” Eddie walked with a pronounced limp and used a cane that summer at the baseball camp, but still taught kids how to hit.
He felt so poorly, however, that he left camp about a week early and drove back to Cambridge. Within days of returning home, he entered the VA Hospital in Jamaica Plain with pneumonia. He was soon diagnosed with esophageal cancer and would never leave the hospital. He died on September 16, 1972, and was just 53 years old.
Waitkus was a card-carrying member of what has become known as the Greatest Generation. But the horrors of his war experience and then his almost fatal shooting took a large toll on him. His drinking, depression, and anxiety issues would now be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder and surely contributed to his early death. But he will always be remembered as a key member of the 1950 Whiz Kids and as one of the smoothest fielding first baseman of his or any time.
