Monday, June 15, 2009

This Day in Baseball History (The Shooting That Inspired “The Natural”)


June 15, 1949—Shortly after midnight, police came to a room in Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel to find Philadelphia Phillies first-baseman Eddie Waitkus bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound. The only reason he didn’t die was because his assailant, an obsessed 19-year-old female fan--as strangely as she had pulled out from the closet a .22 rifle and pulled the trigger —immediately phoned the hotel desk to tell them of her deed.

It’s part of the rich mythology of baseball that, except for the heartbreak of loss, nothing really bad happens as a result of a fan’s emotional investment in the game. At the time of the Waitkus incident, sports readers—or, at least in this case, those who didn’t ask what Waitkus was doing in this woman’s room at such a strange hour—would have seen this as an absolutely inexplicable incident, almost an act of God.

Nowadays, we can see this for what it was—the forerunner of the kind of celebrity stalker who murdered John Lennon and, a little more than 40 years after the Waitkus case, finally galvanized legislation following the murder of ingénue Rebecca Schaeffer.

Last month marked the 25th anniversary of The Natural, my second-favorite baseball movie (after the romantic comedy Bull Durham). I must have seen that film at least a half-dozen times, and in my research for this post I came across people online who confessed to having sat through 25 times. (Baseball exacts this kind of rapt devotion from its fans.)

Many of us who watched the film when it first came out didn’t realize that the incident that alters the life and career of can’t-miss pitching prospect Roy Hobbs (played by Robert Redford, filmed through a suitably gauzy soft-focus lens) was based on the Waitkus case.


In 1952, however, when Bernard Malamud wrote the novel from which the film was adapted, considerably more people would have recognized this plot point’s antecedents, because Waitkus was still playing, albeit not at his former level of accomplishment.

(Incidentally, Waitkus may have inspired another treatment of his harrowing brush with death. An episode of a TV police series of the early 1960s, The Naked City, starred Aldo Ray as a running back who can beat anything on the gridiron, but not the multiple injuries he suffers at the hands of the Steinhagen stand-in, Sandy Dennis.)

Malamud’s novel is a dark fable of lost innocence, with mythic Arthurian overtones (Hobbs’ team, after his mysterious absence, is the New York Knights, and he’s on a quest to become “the best there ever was”). In contrast, the film, under Barry Levinson’s direction, is a generous slice of Capraesque Americana, including Randy Newman’s score, evoking Aaron Copland at his populist peak, and the Fourth of July-style fireworks that ensue following Hobbs’ walkoff homer at the film’s conclusion.

In both novel and film, however, Roy Hobbs starts as a raw country boy who goes to the hotel room under the mistaken belief that he’s about to embark on an assignation.

The Waitkus shooting, however, only served as a starting point for Malamud. The first-time novelist drew more strongly on other figures and events of baseball lore, including Babe Ruth (he’s not only thinly fictionalized as “The Whammer,” but, like Hobbs, begins as a pitcher before becoming a hitter of Bunyanesque proportions), Bob Feller (like Hobbs, a fireballer who wows the baseball establishment before he’s even 20), and Shoeless Joe Jackson (another innocent in way over his head concerning a “thrown” baseball championship game).

The one significant similarity between Hobbs and Waitkus is that both men were haunted by their near-death experiences. In nearly every other way, however, Hobbs differed from his inspiration:

* Hobbs is a heavily touted prospect on the way up to the big leagues; Waitkus had been in the big leagues since 1941, though his career had been interrupted by WWII, when he won several combat medals.


* Hobbs knows the woman he met downstairs, Harriet Bird, will be in the room upstairs, though he has no idea what else is in store for him; Waitkus had been lured up to the room under false pretenses (he interpreted the “Ruth Ann” of the note to be a woman by the same name he had once dated).


* Harriet Bird is a bit older than Hobbs and confuses the phenom with her talk of Sir Lancelot and Homer; Steinhagen was a six-foot brunette, nine years younger than Waitkus, whose reading matter consisted primarily of newspaper clippings about Waitkus and instructional materials about Lithuanian, his ancestral language, which Steinhagen had taken into her head to study.


* Like Ted Williams, Hobbs’ quest is to become the best hitter of all time; Waitkus was more of a singles hitter, whose real strength, though, was on defense, a realm in which contemporaries compared him favorably with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Gil Hodges.


* Hobbs is a farmboy with little formal education; Waitkus was far more sophisticated, according to teammate Richie Ashburn: “He read Latin, loved poetry and classical music and was an expert in ballroom dancing.”


Hobbs took more than a decade to realize his dream of playing in the majors, but when he did, he was like nothing anyone had ever seen before; Waitkus played every game for the entire next season, scoring more than 100 runs and helping the “Whiz Kid” Phillies get into the World Series, but he wasn’t at the same level that he had been before, when he’d made the All-Star team twice.


Neither the instantly broken man at the end of Malamud’s novel nor the triumphant hero of the Redford film, Waitkus suffered a slow death by degrees. True, he met his future wife while convalescing, but the marriage ended by the early 1960s. The once gregarious player became far more suspicious, not even going out to drink with his teammates anymore (the principal part of baseball socializing in those days).


After he retired from the major leagues, he fell on hard times, collecting unemployment in the winter and working at Ted Williams’ baseball camp in the summer. The cancer of the esophagus that killed him in 1972 was identified during his autopsy, not while he was alive, when it could have helped.

What makes me most curious about this case, however, is the fate of Steinhagen. Amazingly, not quite three years after she shot Waitkus, she was released from the insane asylum where she’d been placed after her arrest. Doctors judged that she’d made great progress with the help of medication and electric-shock treatments.

Waitkus later said that Steinhagen “had the coldest-looking face I have ever seen.” Thank God he never set eyes on her again after her release from the asylum. She had damaged him more than enough.

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