Jerry Grillo, 'Big Cat' (SportsLit S8E12 fan notes)
Georgia-based Grillo discusses writing the first complete biography of hall-of-fame slugger Johnny Mize, a home-run king who was like the Forrest Gump of baseball.
True fandom means putting the past in present tense like Johnny Mize sized up pitchers.
It was a trip to connect with Mize biographer Jerry Grillo about his writing of Big Cat. The spirit of the thing called to do it in July, when the Baseball Hall of Fame induction weekend is held. Diving into a true biography of Mize (1913-1993, Cooperstown class of 1981) expands the zone, so to speak. And no one did it while Mize was around.
“He grew up in this secluded environment, in Appalachia, and he turns out to be this incredibly open-minded individual who was all about the adventure in the world,” Grillo says in his appearance on SportsLit.
‘Barguments’ around Hall of Fame-worthiness tend to fixate on career stats and awards — 500 home runs or 3,000 career hits for a batter, MVP awards and Gold Gloves, or pitcher win totals. For eggheads who like their booky-books, thankfully authors such as Grillo can contextualize why Mize did not reach 500 home runs: working conditions, World War II, bumps and bruises of being an athlete when sports medicine was an oxymoron.
Grillo lives in the mountains of north Georgia, where Mize grew up and also lived out in his late innings. In the early 2000s, the writer connected with the now-late Judy Mize, one of the slugger’s adult children.
“There wasn’t a time I didn’t know who Johnny Mize was, because I grew up in the New York area and my dad talked about those guys,” Grillo says. “So when I’m on the phone with Judy, all this came flooding back… a friendship kind of grew from there.
“And it was just very sweet. And after a while I thought it would be great to write about (her) dad and I was just stunned to learn nobody had done a book on him.
Grillo adds, “I just want readers to see the human life of a guy from a small Southern town who, against the odds, made it to the ends of the earth hitting home runs along the way.”
Grillo initially signed with a publisher for a Mize bio in 2001, the year that he and his wife Jane brought their son Joe into the world. Joe lives with cerebral palsy. The caregiving needs for Joe meant that Jerry “kept his eye on that ball… and put the project down for some 20-something years.”
Happy ending, though: “The time still remained right. I still live in the same place and my son, as a 22-year-old young man, still has the disabilities he was born with, but he’s in a place where we can all do the things we need to do. And for me one of those things is writing books.”
Here is some follow-along fanboying. Jerry Grillo can be followed at jerrygrillowriter.com.
Intro
2:00 Big Cat came to our attention through the Baseball Books group on Meta.
3:30 A testimonial that “Jerry Grillo remains at his core a community journalist” was another hint to contact him.1 There is deep admiration for someone who ‘always wanted to write that book’ and finally realized it.
5:00 Henry D. Fetter’s Taking On The Yankees: Winning And Losing In The Business Of Baseball 1903 To 2003 (W.W. Norton, 2003) is a go-to resource for telling the story that the entire history of baseball is a history of money.2
7:00 Friendly FYI, Babe Ruth was in his age-32 season when he hit 60 home runs in 1927. As a 32-year-old, Mize was in the U.S. military.
Referring to the “racist line” instead of the gentler “colour line” is a direct quote from Russell A. Carleton’s The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball (Triumph Books, 2023). Make it catch on at school, kids!
Another citation needed is Rob Ruck’s Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (Beacon Press, 2012).
Interview (starts at 11:30)
16:00 For timeline purposes, Mize’s intake into baseball came in 1930 when he signed on to the St. Louis Cardinals’ ‘chain gang’ at age 17. (If memory serves, the minimum age to sign was 16.) When Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers broke the racist line in 1947, Mize was playing the same position, first base, with the archrival Giants.3 Then his final go-’round was as a 40-year-old with the 1953 Yankees.
19:00 It is never too late to learn about the great Martín Dihigo. The other Black immortals, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, and Cool Papa Bell, all retain a little more name recoginish.
Grillo’s publisher, University of Nebraska Press, released Jeremy Beer’s CASEY Award-winning Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player (2019). Proud to have that in my IKEA bookcases.
24:00 The highlight of the Chatham-Kent Barnstormers’ yearling campaign was Seth Strong, a lefty-batting first baseman à la Mize, winning the Intercounty Baseball League’s home run crown. Strong won the slugging percentage title by 135 points and was just two percentage points shy of the ‘onboarding title’ at .451.4
27:00 The more Grillo describes Branch Rickey’s 1930s-era Cardinal chain gang, the more it sounds like a proto-Tampa Bay Rays. All together now: how can you not be romantic about baseball?
29:30 Always here for a good Gene Woodling shout-out!
The 1951 Yankees team illustrates how manager Casey Stengel practised man management. Only table-setter shortstop Phil Rizzuto, the reigning league MVP, and mid-order catcher Yogi Berra, who won his first MVP that season, got 500 or more turns at bat. Joe DiMaggio was aging out, and 19-year-old Mickey Mantle was just arriving. Of course, the Yankees could rotate their squad since being the Yankees afforded them some depth. Who has the budget for super-utility players when you are just trying to pay the utility bill on Sportsman’s Park?
34:30 Best baseball name on those 1940s Chicago American Giants: Gentry Jessup, their five-time all-star righty pitcher.
39:00 For most, Major League Baseball announcing Josh Gibson is now the career batting average leader barely rated a blip. But it took years of work by Seamheads.com and founder Mike Lynch to recover and verify stats from Black major-league baseball, and one should honour that.
Paul Hemphill has entered the chat
47:00 On his Substack, Gare Joyce recently published a piece about his admiration for journalist-author Paul Hemphill (1936-2009). I could use a do-over on that question, given that my reference point for Hemphill is limited to just the film adaptation of Long Gone. The themes in Hemphill’s work such as “country music, Evangelicalism, football, stock car racing and the blue collar people he met on his journeys around the South” put him in the vein with the kind of wry commentary that Holly Anderson, Jason Kirk, Ryan Nanni and Spencer Hall do through the Shutdown Fullcast. That did not occur to me, dangnammit.
Long Gone was a made-for-HBO movie that was released the year prior to Bull Durham (1988).
Sideways actress Virginia Madsen, who played the female lead, once intimated that Bull Durham filmmaker Ron Shelton studied it very intently to build the beats for his love-triangle minor-league baseball comedy. Of course, Shelton had a vision that he needed to shape, and he was drawing on his five seasons in the Baltimore Orioles farm system, which wrapped at Triple-A Rochester — about 3½ decades after Mize played for the same minor-league team.5
57:00 I get a bit emotional listening to Grillo recount connecting with Carl Erskine (1926-2024).6
In the 1953 World Series, Erskine set a record for the competition with a 14-strikeout game. He put a golden sombrero on Mantle. We can print some legend, here? In one of his ghostwritten auto-bios, Mantle recalled that Mize was full of advice that afternoon about squaring up Erskine’s curveball — and then proceeded to make the record strikeout by chasing on a curveball that bounced on the plate.
1:02:30 Luck and personalities overdetermine which great ballplayers survive the test of historical posterity, and I am obsessive about pushing back on it. Quiet players, or ones whose prime happened away from the major baseball capitals such as Boston and New York, get undervalued. So there is some good context here about Mize, and his Forrest Gump-like “weird adventures.”
1:08:00 When it comes to the evaluative tools of sabermetrics, it affirms that, per Grillo, Hank Greenberg was not “twenty-five years better than Johnny Mize.”
The fancystats show Greenberg, who faced terrible anti-Semitism in his peak years, out-batted the league average by 59 percent across his war-interrupted career. He averaged 6.4 WAR per 162 games played.
Mize out-batted the field by 58 percent over his slightly lengthier, also war-interrupted career and averaged 6.1 WAR per 162.
Another slugger, Dick Allen, one of the most notorious snubs from the expansion era, was 56 percent better. Allen grades to 5.4 WAR per 162 while facing foes drawn from a deeper talent pool and playing in the larger ballparks of the 1960s and ’70s.
1:13:00 Given Mize’s rural background, some comps might be with two relief pitchers I have championed for Cooperstown. Billy Wagner rose from early-life instability as the child of teenage parents, played D-3 college baseball to become a lights-out lefty closer. Wagner will have his last shot at being voted in on the 2025 ballot. No lefty reliever has been voted in.
And, being stubborn, I wish some era committee would try to understand how effin’ dominant Tom Henke was from 1986 through 1995, mostly with my Blue Jays. His oeuvre as a closer rivals what the relievers who have been voted in did when they were in same age range. You could look it up, and the fact Henke retired with meat still on the bone for family reasons should boost his case.
1:15:00 The forthcoming bio by Tim Newby is The Original Louisville Slugger: The Life and Times of Forgotten Baseball Legend Pete Browning. It is being released Sept. 17 by The University Press of Kentucky.
1:17:00 Outfielders are just too athletic in 2024 MLB. Perhaps the home team can strew exercise equipment in the outfield? A few more doubles drop in while Daulton Varsho dodges a tire flip station?
At this writing, only two batters in MLB are on-basing more than .400. Compare that with, 1989, which few would consider a year for mammoth offence. Seven batters were in 1989’s .400 club, with Fred McGriff just missing at .399.
That is a problem. And I hope it was no problem to read this.
Previously on SportsLit
Please visit sportslit.ca for the back catalog of episodes dating to 2017. The interviewer(s) read(s) every title before speaking to the guest(s). Weird flex, I know.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
April 1-Sept. 12, 2024
Hamilton, Ont., on traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and the Mississaugas.
Chris Starrs, “Former Citizen Sports Editor Pens Book about the ‘Big Cat,’ ” Jackson Progress-Argus, May 20.
One beef: in a passage about attendance, Fetter incorrectly credits the Colorado Rockies instead of the Toronto Blue Jays for breaking the 4-million barrier in season attendance. That is ironic, considering the Jays and Yankees are division counterparts, and the Jays and Yankees are the sole teams to win consecutive World Series titles since Marvin Miller, et al., won free-agency rights for the ballplayers. (Neate, sit down.)
KISS principle means calling the teams by their monikers. If you are here, you know that it was the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants. In 1958, they moved simultaneously to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Dodgers made out like bandits in SoCal, and the Giants needed four decades to stabilize. There is a timeline where the Dodgers never leave New York, and the Giants move to Minnesota. There is another one where the Toronto Giants would have been realized, and I would have had to grow up watching pitchers hit instead of real baseball. Ugh!
Jake Sanford, a one-time New York Yankees farmhand, led the IBL with a .453 on-base percentage for the Welland Jackfish. That includes a league-most .393 batting average, so he rates all the epaulets as the batting champion.
Ron Shelton statistics, baseball-reference.com.
Beth Harris, “Carl Erskine, Dodgers pitcher and last surviving member of ‘Boys of Summer,’ dies at 97,” Associated Press, April 16.