Dizzy Like a Fox: Remembering Dizzy Dean

Elected to the Hall of Fame in 1953, Dizzy Dean has the fewest wins (150) of any modern pitcher in the hall, but he is by no means the least deserving. In addition to his fastball, Dizzy Dean was never dull.

Baseball has missed him since his death on July 17, 1974. – Norman L. Macht 

His name was Jay Hanna and Jerome Herman, and he was born on January 16, February 22 and August 22, 1911, in Lucas, Arkansas, Holdenville, Oklahoma, and Bond, Mississippi.

Best known as Dizzy Dean, he did not set out to deceive anybody.

He just thought it was more fun to give sportswriters different versions of his background so they would each have an exclusive story.

Dean had a big mouth, a fun-loving outlook on life, and a right arm that dominated the National League for 5 ½ years. He was a natural showman and a shrewd calculator of his own worth, despite a youth spending more time picking cotton than going to school.

Dixxy Dean’s pitching style

There was nothing deceptive about Dean’s pitching, either. He stood on the mound and told batters what he was going to throw and still struck them out.

Then he laughed, which was one reason many players did not care for him.

Dean relied mostly on just fogging the ball in there. His fastball seemed to rise, then drop as it crossed the plate. Whether it did or not, “seemed to” was enough.

“I don’t throw curves ‘lessen I have to,” Dean explained.

But no pitcher could win 120 games from 1932 to 1936, when the league batting average was .275 or better, with nothing but a fastball.

Dean had two other keys to success: a confounding change of pace and control.

One of every nine starts was a shutout, and he averaged fewer than two walks per game.

Lifetime .324 hitter Babe Herman said Dean had the best change-up he ever saw.

“The Cardinals were leading the Pirates, 1-0, one day, and Pittsburgh had the bases loaded with no outs,” Herman said. “”Diz threw five or six pitches to warm up and [manager] Frankie Frisch called him in.

“Paul Waner, Arky Vaughan and I were coming up. He struck out all three of us with his change-up.

“He’d throw the arm and body and everything at you. Every pitch was perfect, low and on the outside.”

Dean was an excellent fielder and a .225 hitter. A workhorse, he averaged over 300 innings pitched during that five-year period with St. Louis.

He had long slender arms with flat muscles and a smooth, easy motion. He was ready to start twice in a crucial four-game series and relieve in the other two.

In 1934 he finished the season pitching six complete games in 14 days and won five of them, giving up eight runs. Too much strain on the arm? He worked more than 300 innings each of the next two years.

A joker, but a fierce competitor

To Diz, baseball was fun because life was fun. But for all his clowning, there was no fiercer competitor. He loved to brush back hitters and send them sprawling in the dirt.

One day at the Polo Grounds in New York, Dick Bartell hit a home run off Dean for a 2-1 Giants victory. 

“While I was circling the bases, Diz chased me all around the infield, calling me everything he could think of,” Bartell said.

“He yelled, ‘I’m going to stick one in your ear the next time I pitch against you.’ And I’d be expecting it, whether he did it or not.”

On May 19, 1937, against the Giants in St. Louis, Dean sparked one of baseball’s greatest brawls. Players didn’t charge the mound after knockdown pitches in those days.

They took them as part of the game. But when Jimmy Ripple was the seventh Giants batter to go down, they had enough.

Dean and Ripple locked horns at first base after Ripple bunted. The field immediately filled with tussling players.

Fans leaped from the stands to join in, while a ring of policemen stood with the umpires and let the steam dissipate. When order was restored, Diz went back to the mound and hit the next batter.

However, Dean never threw at a fellow pitcher nor a former teammate.

A genuine character

Dean was larger than life and worked at the image. He enjoyed sitting in on other teams’ pregame meetings, telling them how to pitch to Cardinals hitters and how he would pitch that day. He was the essence of the Gas House Gang.

With Pepper Martin, another free spirit, he built a bonfire in front of the dugout when it was 110 in the shade and sat by it wrapped in an Indian blanket. Dressed as painters, he and Martin invaded a formal banquet in a Philadelphia hotel and started moving furniture to redecorate the place.

They entered calf-roping contests at rodeos and raced midget autos on game days, wrestled in the clubhouse, and made hillbilly music together.

Taking exception to a writer’s comments that he was washed up, Diz started a fight in a Tampa hotel lobby that left the place looking as if a hurricane had hit it.

Sportswriter Bob Considine said of him:

“In Dizzy Dean there resides the last great vibrant spirit of baseball.

He has the arrogance of Cobb, the inspired daffiness of Waddell, the fuzzy whimsy of Germany Schaefer and the strut of the early Ruth.

He is a throwback to the kind of ball player who built the stadiums and made the sport the national game. He is petty and often spectacularly mulish, but he is a definite personality; and when he walks across the ball field, you never mistake him for another.”

Many players, including teammates, found him hard to take. Fans booed him, but Diz didn’t care, as long as they went through the turnstiles.

He was brash, boastful, loud, crude, swaggering and vain. His natural splayfooted plowboy’s walk made him seem to be strutting.

In the beginning, Dean had no concept of money. As a rookie in 1930 in St. Joseph, Missouri, he rented rooms in three different hotels.

In spring training the next year, the Cardinals doled out a dollar a day to him and cut off his credit around town.

Diz boasted that he would win 30 for them and was shocked and hurt upon being sent down to Houston, then in the Texas League.

“That’s the first time a team ever lost 30 games in one day,” a wag quipped. Dean won 26 games at Houston and got married. His wife, Pat, saved $1,200 of his $3,000 salary.

Diz acquired financial shrewdness. In September of 1934, the Cardinals seemed out of the pennant race. Dizzy and his brother Paul signed a vaudeville contract for $900 a week.

But Diz had a clause added stipulating that if St. Louis should win the pennant, the deal was off. The Cardinals won, and the brothers signed a new contract for $5,000 a week.

The 1934 season showcased the quintessential Dean. He had bragged on his younger brother until the Cardinals signed him.

“Me and Paul will win 45 games this year,” Diz said. They won 49. Diz was 30-7; he started 33 and relieved in 17.  Paul finished 19-11.

On September 21 in Brooklyn, Diz beat the Dodgers, 13-0, with a three-hitter in the first game of a doubleheader. In the second game, Paul pitched a no-hitter, winning, 3-0.

“Shucks,” Diz said afterward, “if I’d known Paul was going to do that, I’da done it too.”

The 1934 World Series

In the World Series against Detroit, Diz won the opener. Paul won Game 3. In Game 4 Diz made headlines even when he didn’t pitch.

Frisch sent him to first base as a pinch runner in the fourth inning. On a double play attempt, Detroit shortstop Billy Rogell’s throw to first hit Dean in the head and knocked him cold. Dean was carried from the field.

The incident was good for a rash of jokes. “I felt a little dizzy,” Dean said. “How could you tell?” he was asked. The next day Diz gave up six hits in eight innings and lost, 3-1. Then Paul knotted the Series in Game 6.

St. Louis broadcaster France Laux was the Series broadcaster for CBS. “Frisch didn’t know who to pitch in the seventh game in Detroit,” Laux recalled. “Everybody was in the clubhouse meeting except Diz, who was watching the Tigers’ batting practice.

Just as Frisch decided that Bill Hallahan would start, in strode old Diz. He says, ‘Franko, what’s going on?’ Frisch told him, and Diz said, ‘If you want to win, I’m pitching.’ That settled it.

“Diz went out on the field and bumped into the Tigers’ slugging first baseman Hank Greenberg. ‘Hank’ he says, ‘I’m pitching. You know what that means; you won’t get a foul this afternoon.’

“First time up, Greenberg strikes out on three pitches,” Laux continued. “As he walks back to the bench, Diz comes over to the foul line and yells, ‘What did I tell you?’

Next time up Hank fouls one off, but fans on four pitches. By Greenberg’s third time up, the Cardinals are leading, 9-0. Diz keeps shaking off the catcher’s signs. This finally leads to a conference between catcher Bill DeLancey, Dean and Frisch.

Diz says, ‘Franko, they tell me if you pitch to Greenberg high and inside, he can hit it a mile.’ Frisch agrees. Diz says, ‘I don’t think he can do it off me..’

There’s no stopping Diz. He fires one high and inside, and Greenberg hits it as hard as any ball I ever saw. But it curves foul by about a foot. Diz turns to Frisch and says, ‘Franko, by golly you’re right. He can do it.’”

Diz won 28 in 1935 and Paul won 19. But the Cubs won the pennant. The next spring the Cardinals cut Diz’s salary to $18,000. “Me and Paul” held out for $40,000 but did not get it. Diz was 24-13 in ’36, but Paul’s arm died and he broke even in 10 decisions.

The Gas House Gang was running out of gas.

In a way, it was Dean’s eagerness to pitch that finished his career at age 26.

Picked to start the 1937 All-Star Game in Washington, Diz commanded more news space deciding whether to show up or skip the game than the rest of the All-Stars combined.

At the last minute he flew to Washington, saying shucks, he’d always intended to be there, but this was the only way he could avoid the long, hot train ride from St. Louis.

If Dean had stayed home, Earl Averill’s line drive would not have broken his right big toe. If Dean had then taken the rest of the year off, he might have gone on to win 350 to 400 games. But he didn’t. His arm felt great.

Eager to get back into action, he changed his delivery to keep pressure off the toe. That shifted the stress on his shoulder muscles. They couldn’t take it.

Despite Dean’s well-publicized shoulder problems after the All-Star Game injury, Cubs owner Phil Wrigley shelled out $185,000 and two players for him.

Pitching more with his head and heart, Diz won seven and lost one as the Cubs won the 1938 pennant.

In Game 2 of the World Series, Dean led the New York Yankees, 3-2, after seven innings. In the dugout he told manager Gabby Hartnett, “You’ve got to take me out. I want to beat those guys but my arm is gone.”

Hartnett pleaded with Dean to continue. The manager was worried about the reaction of Chicago fans if he pulled Dean, and a reliever lost the game.

“I’m telling you they’ll knock me all over the lot,” Dean said. “If they don’t, they’re blind. The arm weighs a ton. But it’s up to you.”

“Dix, I know your arm hurts,” Hartnett said, “but we’ve got to win or lose with you.”

In the eighth inning, George Selkirk singled and Frank Crosetti hit a two-out homer.

In the ninth Joe DiMaggio hit Dean’s nothing ball over the wall with Tommy Henrich aboard before Larry French came in and finished the game.

Dean won six games in 1939 and three in 1940. He talked about making a comeback but never did. He became a play-by-play announcer after leaving the Cubs.

In 1947 he came down out of the radio booth to start a game for the St. Louis Browns, pitched four scoreless innings in which he gave up three hits, and was 1 for 1 at the plate.

We’ll never see his like again

In one sense, Diz did deceive the public. He was an actor, playing the role of an illiterate bumpkin.

He appeared at state fairs wearing a big white cowboy hat and calling out, “Howdy, pardner.” He was a hustler on the golf course and usually managed to win by one stroke to whet his victim’s appetite for another match.

On the air, Diz sang “The Wabash Cannonball” and mangled grammar while coining his own version of the King’s English.

He got more headlines when Missouri teachers protested the example he was setting for students.

Former major league infielder Buddy Blattner, Dean’s partner for seven years on “The Game of the Week,” said it was all an act.

One day Dean was working a game with France Laux. On a play at third, Diz announced, “He slid into third and was out.” Then he turned to Laux and, still on the air, said, “I shoulda said slud, shouldn’t I?”

From then on, it was “slud.”

The fans loved it, and it certainly was more fun to hear about the sad play of the Browns the way Diz described it.