[GeoPoto]

Player #158F: Cecil H. Travis Part 6. Infielder for the Washington Senators in 1933-1941 and 1945-1947. 1,544 hits and 27 home runs over 12 MLB seasons. 3-time All-Star. One of two to get 5 hits in first game. Led American League in hits in 1941 despite DiMaggio's 56-game hit streak and Ted Williams hitting .406. His best season was 1941 as he posted a .410 OBP with 101 RBIs in 663 plate appearances. In the Army during 1942-45, he wound up a frostbite victim in the Battle of the Bulge and a Bronze Star recipient. His return to MLB after the war surgery was not the same.

Travis is remembered not only as a pure, line-drive hitter but also as one of the classiest players in the game. He was a quiet, unassuming star, and American League umpires once voted him their favorite player. Such names as Ted Williams, Bob Feller, and Bowie Kuhn (who served as a batboy and scoreboard operator for the Senators during Travis’ tenure) have called for Travis’ induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Travis supporters point out that the war had effectively ended his career just as he was reaching new heights, and that even with his precipitous postwar decline, his career .314 compares favorably with all but two Hall of Fame shortstops (Honus Wagner and Arky Vaughan). Characteristically, though, Travis himself refuses to campaign for himself. “I was a good player, but I wasn’t a great one,” he told Furman Bisher of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (October 3, 1999). He has never bemoaned the playing years lost to military service. “We had a job to do, an obligation, and we did it. I was hardly the only one” (Marty Appel). Travis was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1975 and into RFK Stadium’s Hall of Stars in 1993.

Cecil Travis passed away on December 16, 2006, of congestive heart failure, on his farm in Riverdale, Georgia. He was 93.

(This ends our stroll through pre-war Washington baseball history and the players who were part of it. Thanks for listening!)