Things are getting Creepy around here ...

[Chris-Counts]

Because Halloween is just around the corner, I’d like to pay tribute to the creepiest of all baseball players, Frank “Creepy” Crespi, who had a brief but seriously strange career in the early 1940s.

Although some of the details of Crespi’s life are fuzzy, here is my short summary of the highlights. Born in St. Louis, he grew up in the same neighborhood that would later produce Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola. He must have been a pretty good player, because he didn’t get stuck in the Cardinals’ vast farm system, and arrived at Sportsman’s Park in 1938 when he was just 20. After a solid season as the Cardinals' second baseman in 1941, he slumped in 1942, but still took home a World Series ring. He also earned some respect for brawling with the notoriously prickly Joe Medwick and getting in some good licks — he received praise from none other than legendary umpire Bill Klem for his efforts. This marks the high point of Crespi’s career — and pretty much the end of it.

After joining the Army — he didn’t have to serve because he was the sole source of support for his mother — he soon suffered a compound left leg fracture in a baseball game. Later, according to some accounts, he reinjured the leg in a “tank accident,” whatever that might entail. Next, after a bunch of operations — he had at least 14 on the leg — he suffered another setback when he crashed racing his wheelchair around a hospital. And while he still held out hope of reviving his baseball career even after that folly, his aspirations were finally put to rest by a nurse who mistakenly bathed his leg in a caustic solution that badly burned it.

With his leg a wreck and his baseball career now just a memory, Crespi went to college on the GI Bill, and went work as a budget analyst for defense contractor McDonnell Douglas. But his baseball odyssey wasn’t yet complete. Through some stroke of luck, the baseball establishment had somehow forgot to put him on the retired list back in the 1940s, and he sat on the disabled list instead. It was discovered by Marvin Miller in 1983 that he was there long enough to be eligible for a pension — which he enjoyed until he passed away seven years later.

I don’t have in my collection the only card of Crespi that I know of, his 1941 Cardinals team issue (can somebody post one?). But I’ve shared a George Burke photo, along with one of the coolest handmade cards I’ve even seen. It was the acquisition of the latter that inspired my research here.