Ben Geraghty

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Benjamin Raymond Geraghty (July 19, 1912 - June 18, 1963) was an American infielder in Major League Baseball and one of the most successful and respected minor league managers of the 1950s.

Geraghty was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and he was a graduate of Villanova University, where he received a degree in journalism. A righthanded batter and thrower, he appeared in only 70 major league games with the Brooklyn Dodgers (1936) and Boston Braves (1943-44), compiling a batting average of .199 in 146 at bats.

On June 24, 1946, Geraghty survived one of the greatest tragedies in baseball history, when the bus carrying his team, the Spokane Indians of the Class B Western International League, crashed while attempting to avert an oncoming car on a rain-slicked mountain pass. Nine players were killed; Geraghty was among the severely injured. The team was decimated and could only continue the season with players loaned from other clubs and organizations.

The following season Geraghty was able to return to Spokane to manage the Indians, and led them to a second place finish and 87 victories. But his health would never be the same. He would manage in the minors for the next 16 seasons, but he was troubled by a heart condition and reportedly struggled with alcoholism.

In his 17-year managing career, Geraghty won 1,317 games and lost 1,021 (.563) and won five pennants in seven years (1953-59) while piloting Class A South Atlantic League and Class AAA American Association farm clubs of the Braves, then based in Milwaukee. In the ten seasons between 1953 and 1962, a Geraghty-managed team never finished lower than second place. But his impact was felt beyond mere wins and losses. In 1953, Geraghty managed an integrated team in the Jim Crow South with the Jacksonville club, and one of his players was 19-year-old Henry Aaron.

Aaron, wrote author and former minor league pitcher Pat Jordan in his 1975 memoir A False Spring, "believed that Ben Geraghty was the greatest manager who ever lived, certainly the greatest manager he ever played for ..." In addition to his on-field strategic acumen and his ability to develop playing talent, Geraghty, a white man, regularly confronted the rigid racial segregation of the times, insisting that he and his African-American players be served as equals at the finest restaurants. "Invariably, they would be refused service," Jordan wrote. "While Aaron waited nervously outside, Geraghty complained loudly to the management ... They [would go] to the next best restaurant, and the next and the next, until Geraghty finally located one that would serve [them] ..."

But Geraghty would never be called to manage in the major leagues. Ill health sidelined him for much of the 1960 season, while he was in the midst of a three-year run as skipper of Milwaukee's Louisville Colonels AAA farm club. In 1962, he left the Braves and joined the Cleveland Indians farm system as manager of their new AAA International League affiliate, the Jacksonville Suns. His 1962 team won 94 games, and Geraghty earned his second Minor League Manager of the Year Award and final pennant. The following June 18, in the middle of his second season in the new job, Geraghty was stricken with a fatal heart attack in Jacksonville. He was one month shy of his 51st birthday.