Home from the Field

Let the sawed-off, hammered-down, pint-flask-size men of the world hold their heads in pride high above their inches today. A new Napoleon has arisen to the height of five feet seven to lead the bantam brigade.

--Damon Runyon, Oct. 7, 1919

Runyon's sawed-off Napoleon was a wiry Chicago southpaw pitcher named Dickie Kerr who had just won his second game for the White Sox in baseball's most embarrassing World Series. Behind him, some of the best players in the history of the game had played like bushers. Shoeless Joe Jackson, perhaps the greatest outfielder of them all, was unaccountably awkward under easy flies; Swede Risberg, the sure-handed shortstop, was fielding grounders with his feet; First Baseman Chick Gandil seemed asleep on the sack. But sawed-off Kerr had pitched his heart out against the Cincinnati Reds (who took the series, 5-3) and won. And not until a year later did Dickie or anyone else know for sure that he had been throwing for thieves--that his laggard teammates were the notorious Black Sox who had been bought by gamblers and had fixed the series.

Kinds of Defeat. As Honest Dickie Kerr recalls, afterwards all the high spots of his career were involved with a sort of defeat. It was Dickie Kerr who threw a two-and-two pitch to a burly batter named Babe Ruth one afternoon in 1921 in the old Polo Grounds. And the Babe belted it so far it set a special kind of record: it broke the hands of an outfield clock some 500 ft. from the plate. It was Pitcher Kerr who asked his boss Charles ("The Old Roman") Comiskey for a raise after winning 40 games in two seasons. "Just give me a dollar more than the $4,800 I'm getting," he pleaded. Once more he was beaten; Comiskey refused. So Dickie Kerr took his pride to the outlaw leagues and never again amounted to anything in organized baseball.

Never, that is, until he had drifted down to a job as manager of the Class D Daytona Beach farm club for the St. Louis Cardinals. There he had a skinny Polish kid named Stanley Musial who thought he was a pitcher. Kerr watched the boy and decided that as a pitcher he made a superb hitter. When Musial was not working on the mound, Kerr kept him in the line-up as an outfielder so that his potent bat was always available. Then one day Stan fell on his throwing arm and finished his career as a $100-a-month Class D southpaw. Despondently, Stan figured it was time to quit.

Million-Dollar Accident. Dickie Kerr disagreed. He took the discouraged boy into his home, fed him and befriended him, and made a place for his pregnant wife. "I convinced him that he wasn't much of a pitcher anyway," says Kerr. "And as a hitter he was a natural. You might say Stan's was a million-dollar accident."

Dickie Kerr is done with baseball now, and it is his proud boast that "I've never gotten anything out of the game but what it paid me." But last week, at 64, he was enjoying a great deal more than that. When Stan ("The Man") Musial became the eighth man ever to make 3.000 big-league hits (TIME, May 12), Dickie Kerr and his wife heard the news in their new Houston home, a neat white frame bungalow that had just been bought for them, out of gratitude and a sense of everlasting obligation, by a sore-armed Class D pitcher named Stanley Frank Musial.

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