Buddy Myer
Player #139F: Charles S. "Buddy" Myer. Second baseman with the Washington Senators in 1925-1927 and 1929-1941. 2,131 hits and 38 home runs in 17 MLB seasons. He had a career OBP of .389. 2-time All-Star. 1935 AL Batting champion. 1928 AL Stolen Base leader. His best season was 1935 for Washington as he posted a .440 OBP with 115 runs scored and 100 RBIs in 719 plate appearances. He was involved in one of baseball's most violent brawls when he was spiked and possibly racially derided by the Yankees' Ben Chapman.
We will follow Myer's SABR biography as we track his career -- Part 6: Myer credited his big year (in 1935) —a batting average 36 points above his previous high—to giving up cigars and taking up golf. He said playing golf helped him stay in shape in the offseason and stopping smoking increased his energy, as well as pleasing Clark Griffith, an antismoking crusader. (Myer continued to chew unlit cigars.) He believed the switch from leadoff to third in the order was an advantage, because he didn’t feel the need to take as many pitches.
The batting championship earned Myer a $500 bonus from the league and a $4,500 raise from Griffith, to $14,000. As to what he was really worth, Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert offered a reported $200,000 for him. Griffith said, “Well, I sold Joe Cronin to Tom Yawkey for $250,000; Ruppert is worth twice as much as Yawkey, so I’m asking $500,000 for Myer.” New York writer Dan Daniel reported that the Yankees thought “the big army of Jewish fans of this tremendous Metropolitan area would be lured into the park by a Jewish star.” While the big dollars made good publicity, Myer stayed in Washington.
Comments on players’ ethnic backgrounds were common in a time when many American cities were full of first- and second-generation European immigrants. A player’s Irish, Italian, German, or even Bohemian (Joe Vosmik) ancestry was part of his public biography. Newspaper stories during Myer’s career routinely referred to him as a Jew. The sportswriter Fred Lieb ranked him as the second-greatest Jewish player of all time, after Hank Greenberg. (This was before Koufax.) Jewish writers such as Daniel and the Washington Post’s Shirley Povich, who covered the Senators every day, apparently never questioned his Jewishness. And Myer never denied it.
|