AP
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Bill Mazeroski, the Hall of Fame second baseman who received eight Gold Glove awards for his regular work in the sector and the hearts of numerous Pittsburgh Pirates followers for his historic walk-off home run in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, has died at the age of 89.
Pirates chairman Bob Nutting mentioned “Maz was one of a kind, a true Pirates legend … His name will always be tied to the biggest home run in baseball history and the 1960 World Series championship, but I will remember him most for the person he was: humble, gracious and proud to be a pirate.”
Mazeroski died Friday, the Pirates mentioned. No trigger of dying was given.
Elected to the Hall by the Veterans Committee in 2001, he was, by some measures, no celebrity. Mazeroski had the bottom batting common, on-base proportion and stolen base whole of any second baseman in Cooperstown. He hit simply .260 lifetime, with 138 homers and 27 stolen bases in 17 years, and had an on-base proportion of .299. He by no means batted .300, by no means approached 100 runs batted or 100 runs scored and solely as soon as completed in the highest 10 for Most Valuable Player.
His finest qualities had been each tangible and past the field rating. His Hall of Fame plaque praises him as a “defensive wizard” with “hard-nosed hustle” and a “quiet work ethic.” A ten-time All-Star, he turned a serious league report 1,706 double performs, incomes the nickname “No Hands” for how rapidly he fielded grounders and relayed them. He led the National League 9 occasions in assists for second basemen and has been cited by statistician Bill James as the sport’s best defensive participant at his place — by far.
“I think defense belongs in the Hall of Fame,” Mazeroski mentioned, defensively, throughout his Hall of Fame induction speech. “Defense deserves as much credit as pitching and I’m proud to be going in as a defensive player.”
But his profession’s signature second happened in the batter’s field, because the square-jawed, tobacco-chewing Mazeroski, a coal miner’s son from West Virginia, lived out the dream of so many youngsters who thought of taking part in skilled ball.
The Pirates had not reached the World Series since 1927, once they had been swept by the New York Yankees, and once more confronted the Yankees in 1960. While New York was led by Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, Pittsburgh had few distinguished names past a younger Roberto Clemente. They relied on hitters starting from shortstop Dick Groat to outfielder Bob Skinner, and the beginning pitchers Vernon Law and Bob Friend. Mazeroski, who turned 24 that September, completed the season with a .273 common and often batted eighth.
The sequence informed one story in the runs column and one other in wins and losses. The Yankees outscored the Pirates 55-27, and 38-3 in the three video games they received. Mazeroski’s counterpart on New York, Bobby Richardson, drove in a report 12 runs and was named the sequence’ MVP — regardless that he was on the shedding workforce. Whitey Ford shut out the Pirates twice, on his option to a then-record 33 2-3 straight scoreless World Series innings for the Yankees ace.
The Pirates’ first three wins weren’t almost so spectacular, however they had been wins — and Mazeroski helped. He hit a 2-run homer in the fourth inning off the Yankees’ Jim Coates in Game 1, a 6-4 Pirate victory, and a 2-run double in the second inning off Art Ditmar in Game 5, a 5-2 Pittsburgh win. In Game 7, he saved his large hit for the tip.
Some 36,000 followers at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, and lots of extra tuning in on radio and tv, agonized by one of the autumn basic’s wildest and most emotional conclusions. The lead modified backwards and forwards as Pittsburgh scored the sport’s first 4 runs, solely to fall behind because the Yankees rallied in the center innings and went forward 7-4 in the highest of the eighth. Pittsburgh retook the lead with 5 runs in the underside of the eighth, helped in half by a seeming double play grounder that took a foul hop and struck Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat. But the Yankees got here proper again and tied the rating at 9 in the highest of the ninth.
The backside of the ninth has been relived, not at all times by alternative, by the 2 groups and by generations of followers. The New York pitcher was Ralph Terry, a proper hander whom supervisor Casey Stengel had introduced in in the course of the earlier inning and would later acknowledge that he had a drained arm. The right-handed hitting Mazeroski, who had grounded right into a double play in his earlier look, was up first.
Terry began with a fastball, known as excessive for a ball. After conferring briefly with catcher Johnny Blanchard, who reminded him to maintain his pitches down, he threw what Mazeroski would name a slider that didn’t slide. Mazeroski obtained beneath it and belted it to left, the ball rising and rising because it cleared the excessive, ivy-covered brick wall, with Yankees left fielder Yogi Berra circling beneath it, then turning away in defeat. The complete metropolis appeared to erupt, as if all had swung the bat with him, as if he had been each underdog who longed to beat the hated Yankees. Mazeroski dashed across the bases, grinning and waving his cap, joined by celebrants from the stands who had rushed on to the sector and adopted him to home plate, the place his teammates embraced him.
“I was just looking to get on base,″ he told The New York Times in 1985. ″Nothing fancy, just looking for a fastball until he got a strike on me. I thought it would be off the wall, and I wanted to make third if the ball ricocheted away from Berra. But when I got around first and was digging for second, I saw the umpire waving circles above his head and I knew it was over.”
ESPN has known as it the best home run in main league historical past. It was the primary time a World Series had ended on a homer, resulting in enduring waves of celebration and despair. Pirates followers memorized the date, Saturday, Oct. 13, 1960, and the native time of Mazeroski’s hit, 3:36 p.m. Forbes Field was torn down in the Seventies, however a decade later followers started gathering each Oct. 13 at the park’s lone remnant, the middle subject wall, and listened to the unique broadcast.
Meanwhile, Mantle would sob on the aircraft trip home in 1960, insisting the higher workforce had misplaced. Ford would for years stay indignant at Stengel — fired 5 days after the Series — for utilizing him in Games 3 and 6 and making him unavailable to begin a 3rd time. Singer Bing Crosby, a co-owner of the Pirates, was so afraid he’d jinx his workforce that he listened to the sport with mates throughout the Atlantic Ocean, in Paris.
“We were in this beautiful apartment, listening on shortwave, and when it got close Bing opened a bottle of Scotch and was tapping it against the mantel,” his widow, Kathryn Crosby, informed the Times in 2010. “When Mazeroski hit the home run, he tapped it hard; the Scotch flew into the fireplace and started a conflagration.”
Mazeroski was a Pirate for his complete time in the majors and was a workforce man off the sector. His spouse, Milene Nicholson, was a entrance workplace worker whom he met by Pittsburgh supervisor Danny Murtaugh. They had been married in 1958, had two sons and remained collectively till her dying in 2024.
William Stanley Mazeroski was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in the course of the Great Depression, grew up in jap Ohio, and lived for a time in a one-room home with out electrical energy or indoor plumbing. His father, Louis Mazeroski, had hoped himself to be a ballplayer and inspired his son’s love for sports activities, even working towards with him by having Bill subject tennis balls thrown towards a brick wall.
Although a star in basketball and soccer, he favored baseball and was ok to be drafted by the Pirates at age 17, in 1954. Mazeroski was a shortstop for a workforce with quite a few prospects at that place, and had switched to second by his rookie 12 months, 1956. Even as a part-time participant at the tip of his profession, he was a frontrunner and regular presence on the 1971 workforce that featured Clemente and Willie Stargell and defeated the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series.
After his ultimate season, 1972, Mazeroski coached briefly for the Pirates and the Seattle Mariners and was an infield teacher for Pittsburgh throughout spring coaching. In 1987, the Pirates retired his uniform quantity, 9. The fiftieth anniversary of his Game 7 heroics was marked in 2010 by the revealing — on Bill Mazeroski Way — of a 14-foot, 2,000-pound statue of one of Pittsburgh’s best everymen, rounding the bases, on high of the world.
