| Roy Campanella | |
|---|---|
| Catcher | |
| Born: November 19, 1921 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
|
| Died: June 26, 1993 (aged 71) Woodland Hills, California |
|
| Batted: Right | Threw: Right |
| MLB debut | |
| April 20, 1948 for the Brooklyn Dodgers | |
| Last MLB appearance | |
| September 29, 1957 for the Brooklyn Dodgers | |
| Career statistics | |
| Batting average | .276 |
| Home runs | 242 |
| Runs batted in | 856 |
| Teams | |
| Career highlights and awards | |
| Member of the National | |
| Baseball Hall of Fame | |
| Induction | 1969 |
| Vote | 79.41% |
Roy Campanella (November 19, 1921 – June 26, 1993), nicknamed "Campy", was an American baseball player, primarily at the position of catcher, in the Negro leagues and Major League Baseball. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Widely considered to have been one of the greatest catchers in the history of the game,[1] Campanella played for the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1940s and 1950s, as one of the pioneers in breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball. His career was cut short in 1958 when he was paralyzed in an automobile accident.[2]
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Campanella's father John was the son of Sicilian immigrants. His mother Ida was African American. Therefore, he was barred from Major League Baseball before 1947, the season that black players were admitted to the Major Leagues for the first time since the 19th century. Campanella began playing Negro league baseball for the Washington Elite Giants in 1937, after dropping out of school on his sixteenth birthday. The Elite Giants would move to Baltimore the following year,[3] and Campanella would go on to become a star player with the team.
In 1942 and 1943, Campanella played in the Mexican League with the Monterrey Sultans. Lazaro Salazar, the team's manager, told Campanella that he would play one day at the Major League level. In 1971, Campanella was elected to the Mexican League Hall Of Fame.[4]
In 1946, Campanella moved into the Brooklyn Dodgers' minor league system, as the Dodger organization began preparations to break the Major Leagues' color barrier with Jackie Robinson. For the 1946 season, Robinson was assigned to the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers' affiliate in the Class AAA International League. Meanwhile, the team looked to assign Campanella to a Class B league. After the general manager of the Danville Dodgers of the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League reported that he did not feel that league ready for racial integration, the organization sent Campanella, along with pitcher Don Newcombe, to the Nashua Dodgers of the Class B New England League, where the Dodgers felt the climate would be more tolerant. The Nashua team thus became the first professional baseball team in the 20th century to field a racially integrated lineup in the United States.
Campanella's 1946 season proceeded largely without racist incidents, and in one game Campanella took over the managerial duties after manager Walter Alston was ejected. This made Campanella the first African-American to manage white players on an organized professional baseball team. Nashua was three runs down at the time Campanella took over. They came back to win, in part due to Campanella's decision to use Newcombe as a pinch hitter in the seventh inning; Newcombe hit a game-tying two-run home run.
Jackie Robinson's first season in the Major Leagues came in 1947, and Campanella began his Major League career with the Brooklyn Dodgers the following season, playing his first game on April 20, 1948. He went on to play for the Dodgers from 1948 through 1957 as their regular catcher. In 1948, he had three different uniform numbers (33, 39, and 56) before settling on 39 for the rest of his career.
Campanella played in the All-Star Game every year from 1949 through 1956. His 1949 All-Star selection made him one of the first four African-Americans so honored. (Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe and Larry Doby were also All-Stars in 1949.)[5] Campanella received the Most Valuable Player (MVP) award in the National League three times: in 1951, 1953, and 1955. In each of his MVP seasons, he batted over .300, hit over 30 home runs and had over 100 runs batted in. His 142 RBIs in 1953 broke the franchise record of 130, which had been held by Jack Fournier (1925) and Babe Herman (1930). Today it is the second-most in franchise history, Tommy Davis breaking it with 153 RBIs in 1962. That same year, Campanella hit 40 home runs in games in which he appeared as a catcher, a record that lasted until 1996, when it was broken by Todd Hundley. Over his career, he threw out 57% of the base runners who tried to steal a base on him, the highest by any catcher in major league history.[6]
In 1955, Campanella's final MVP season helped propel Brooklyn to its first-ever World Series championship. After the Dodgers dropped the first two games of that year's World Series to the Yankees, Campanella began Brooklyn's comeback by hitting a two-out, two-run home run in the first inning of Game 3. The Dodgers won that game, got another home run from Campanella in a Game 4 victory that tied the series, and then went on to claim the series in seven games.
Campanella caught three no-hitters during his career: Carl Erskine's two on June 19, 1952 [7] and May 12, 1956 [8] and Sal Maglie's on September 25, 1956.[9]
After the 1957 season, the Brooklyn Dodgers relocated to Los Angeles, California, and became the Los Angeles Dodgers, but Campanella's playing career came to an end before he ever played a game for Los Angeles.
Campanella lived in Glen Cove, New York, on the North Shore of Long Island, while operating a liquor store in Harlem between regular-season games and during the off-season. On January 28, 1958, after closing the store for the night, he began his drive to his home in Glen Cove. En route, traveling at about 30 mph (48 km/h), his car (a rented 1957 Chevrolet sedan) hit a patch of ice at an S-curve on Dosoris Lane near Apple Tree Lane, skidded into a telephone pole and overturned, breaking Campanella's neck. He fractured the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae and compressed the spinal cord.[10][11] The accident left Campanella paralyzed from the shoulders down.[10] Through physical therapy, he eventually was able to gain substantial use of his arms and hands.[12] He was able to feed himself, shake hands, and gesture while speaking, but he would require a wheelchair for mobility for the remainder of his life.[13]
After his playing career, Campanella remained involved with the Dodgers. In January 1959 the Dodgers named him assistant supervisor of scouting for the eastern part of the United States and special coach at the team's annual spring training camp in Vero Beach, Florida, serving each year as a mentor and coach to young catchers in the Dodger organization.[14] In 1978, he moved to California and took a job as assistant to the Dodgers' director of community relations, Campanella's former teammate and longtime friend Don Newcombe.
| Roy Campanella's number 39 was retired by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1972. |
On May 7, 1959, the Dodgers, then playing their second season in Los Angeles, honored Campanella with Roy Campanella Night at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The New York Yankees agreed to make a special trip to Los Angeles to play an exhibition game against the Dodgers for the occasion. The Yankees won the game, 6-2. The attendance at the game was 93,103, setting a record at that time for the largest crowd to attend a Major League Baseball game. The proceeds from the game went to defray Campanella's medical bills. In 1969, Campanella was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the second player of African American heritage so honored, after Jackie Robinson. The same year, he received the Bronze Medallion from the City of New York.
On June 4, 1972, the Dodgers retired Campanella's uniform number 39 alongside Robinson's (42) and Sandy Koufax's (32).
In an article in Esquire magazine in 1976, sportswriter Harry Stein published an article called the "All Time All-Star Argument Starter," a list of five ethnic baseball teams. Campanella was the catcher on Stein's black team.
In 1999, Campanella ranked number 50 on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, and was a nominee for the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
In 2006, Campanella was featured on a United States postage stamp.[15] The stamp is one of a block of four honoring baseball sluggers, the others being Mickey Mantle, Hank Greenberg, and Mel Ott.
In September 2006, the Los Angeles Dodgers announced the creation of the Roy Campanella Award, which is voted among the club's players and coaches and is given to the Dodger who best exemplifies "Campy's" spirit and leadership. Shortstop Rafael Furcal was named the inaugural winner of the award.
Campanella was married three times. He married Bernice Ray in 1939, with whom he had two daughters; they divorced a few years later. On April 30, 1945, he married Ruthe Willis and had three children together (including a son, television director Roy Campanella II), though their relationship deteriorated after his accident; they separated in 1960 and Ruthe died in January 1963. On May 5, 1964, Campanella married Roxie Doles, who survived him.
Campanella died of a heart attack on June 26, 1993, in his Woodland Hills, California home.[2][16] He was cremated by the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.[17] His widow, Roxie, died of cancer in 2004.
In March 2011, Simon & Schuster published a new biography of Campanella written by Neil Lanctot, author of Negro League Baseball - The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution. The book is entitled Campy - The Two Lives of Roy Campanella.[18] The book reveals new details about Campanella's near-fatal car accident and his stormy relationship with Jackie Robinson.
The book Carl Erskine's Tales from the Dodgers Dugout: Extra Innings (2004) includes short stories from former Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine. Campanella is prominent in many of these stories.
Campanella himself authored the inspirational book It’s Good to Be Alive, published in 1959, which details his journey back from the near-fatal car accident that left him paralyzed. The book mentions the years of tireless efforts by physical therapist Sam Brockington which allowed Campanella to regain some use of his arms, eventually overcome his initial bitterness about his fate, and finally adopt an optimistic outlook on life. Michael Landon made his TV-movie directorial debut in the 1974 movie It’s Good to Be Alive, in which Campanella was portrayed by Paul Winfield.
Roy Campanella was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow on the CBS program Person to Person on October 2, 1953 and again on January 2, 1959. Campanella also appeared as Mystery Guest on What's My Line? episode 171 on September 6, 1953 and as a guest celebrity on The Name's the Same (ABC-TV) on July 27, 1954. Campanella was also mentioned in the lyrics of the song "Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit that Ball?", written and recorded by Buddy Johnson in 1949 (and covered by Count Basie and his Orchestra that same year) and in the lyrics to the song "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel. Campanella was also honored on the famous Ralph Edwards show This Is Your Life. Campanella appeared as himself in the Lassie episode "The Mascot," first broadcast September 27, 1959, in a story where he is coaching Timmy Martin's "Boys' League" team.