Quote of the Day (Roger Kahn, on a Boy of Summer)

"Carl Furillo was pure ballplayer. In his prime he stood six feet tall and weighed 190 pounds and there was a fluidity to his frame you seldom see, among such sinews. His black hair was thick, and tightly curled. His face was strong and smooth. He had the look of a young indomitable centurion ... I cannot imagine Carl Furillo in his prime as anything other than a ballplayer. Right field in Brooklyn was his destiny." --Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer (1972)

In the 1947-57 period, when the center of baseball was in New York, the Brooklyn Dodgers kept falling, with the exception of the 1955 World Series, to the New York Yankees. That team deserved better: They not only initiated a crucial moment in baseball history (the breaking of the color line, through Jackie Robinson) but also gathered together one of the most talented lineups ever to play on the diamond--perhaps the best team ever not to become a dynasty. One of their key players was Carl Furillo, born on this date in 1922 in Stony Creek Mills, Pa.

Thirty years after I first read Roger Kahn’s classic The Boys of Summer, the chapter on Furillo especially stays with me. While Kahn was covering the team as a young reporter, Furillo was a god of right field: “People came early just to watch Furillo unlimber his arm. The throws whined homeward, hurtled off a bounce and exploded against Roy Campanella's glove--pom, pom, pom, pom--knee-high fastballs thrown from three hundred feet ... Throughout the grandstands men said to one another, 'He's a master.'"

Unfortunately, his career did not end happily for the one-time “Reading Rifle,” 1953 batting champion and lifetime .299 hitter. Furillo, reacting to his unceremonious release by the Dodgers (now infamously having moved cross-country to Los Angeles) following an injury in 1960, had sued to collect the rest of his $30,000 contract, and won. After an unsuccessful attempt to secure payment he felt owed for the following season, the remaining major-league clubs turned down his written offer to pinch-hit and coach. In those pre-free agency days, it’s hard not to resist the conclusion that, in Kahn’s words, “people in baseball’s conformist ambiance decided he was a ‘Bolshevik.’"

By the time Kahn caught up with him, a decade later, Furillo was a hardhat, installing elevator doors in the old World Trade Center, then under construction. Later, he worked as a security guard for a nylon factory in Stony Creek Mills.

Throughout the early part of his career with the Dodgers, Furillo had clung to his dream of a championship with a Sisyphean determination against the odds. Among all the players interviewed by Kahn, except for third baseman Billy Cox (a bartender a decade removed from the game), perhaps none had been buffeted by time and fate as much as Furillo.

Today, he would undoubtedly have had a lawyer, money manager and accountant to look after his financial needs. Before the onset of free agency, however, Furillo was at the mercy of every kind of ploy management dared pull: not just his unconditional release when his days as an everyday player were gone, but also the Dodgers' reimbursement of only half his relocation expenses to the West Coast after he'd been promised full payment.

A few years before his death in 1989, Furillo accepted an invitation from the Dodgers to appear at one of their Old-Timers’ Games in Los Angeles. It was good that fans finally had a chance to pay tribute to this proud man and superb ballplayer who had been instrumental in the team’s first World Series win in Los Angeles and their only fall classic victory in Brooklyn.