Sport: The Doc

When the baseball season ends, Doc Hyland’s busiest season begins. For nine weeks, ailing ballplayers have come to his St. Louis office to see the man known as “baseball’s surgeon-general.” Dr. Robert Hyland has a physician’s professional reticence about discussing patients; besides, baseball’s big winter meetings are coming up. “Some of the men are liable to be up for trading,” said Doc.

Back in 1938, he had examined Dizzy Dean’s great pitching arm, found Dizzy a victim of bursitis, and predicted that his pitching days were numbered. Shortly afterwards, the St. Louis Cardinals sold Dizzy to the Chicago Cubs for $185,000, even though the Cubs knew of Dr. Hyland’s findings. Last week three of the doctor’s patients were easily identifiable as Cardinals. It was no secret either that the 1949 pennant hopes of the New York Giants would rise or fall on how skillfully Doc Hyland carved a bone growth from Catcher Walker Cooper’s kneecap this week.

Since Babe Ruth tore his finger on some chicken wire 17 years ago, at least 5,000 big leaguers have visited baseball’s two surgical meccas—St. Louis and Baltimore. Doc Hyland, a good-natured, husky 60, gets all the St. Louis trade, and a lot of Eastern clients besides. In Baltimore, the man to see is testy, trim Dr. George Bennett, a famed orthopedic surgeon and a rabid baseball fan, like Hyland. Dr. Bennett’s most recent patient: Joe DiMaggio, who walked out of Johns Hopkins hospital on crutches last week after having a spur cut from his right heel.

Forkballs & Sliders. Dr. Hyland, a frustrated ballplayer himself, resents any suggestion that the present-day frequency of “elbow chips” and bone growths means that players are less durable than of old. Says Doc, who often talks the way sport-writers write: “Today’s crop is obviously better educated and, if anything, up to a faster type of baseball. The culprit in the injury woodpile is the development of trick pitching.”

Most of his baseball patients are pitchers. To keep pace with improved batting techniques, pitchers throw an assortment of forkballs, knuckle balls, screwballs and sliders. “Try it yourself and feel the strain on your elbow,” says Dr. Hyland. His commonest operation—removing calcium deposits from elbows—made new men of Pitchers Howie Pollet and Red Munger. The list of patients who have consulted him would make an impressive line-up for an All-Star game. Among them: Ty Cobb (one of his steadiest customers), Frank Frisch, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Cronin, Mel Ott, Bobby Doerr.

Big, home-run-hitting John Mize might never have been a big leaguer but for Doc Hyland. The Cincinnati Reds passed him up 13 years ago when another doctor discovered an old pelvic injury (the result of riding mules bareback in his Georgia childhood). Doc Hyland operated and Big John did the rest.

The Prejudices & Pars. Doctoring ballplayers is more of a hobby than a business with Doc Hyland. He is chief surgeon (with twelve to 14 assistants) for 4,200 employees of the St. Louis transit system and their families. His parents, hostile towards baseball, wouldn’t let him play, so he turned to medicine. But for a while, under an assumed name, he played first base with a Grand Rapids team, hit a home run in his first game. He was a crack golfer (low yos) until hit by a taxi 21 years ago. The taxi driver lost his job; it is characteristic of Doc Hyland that he got the cabbie another job.

Busy as he is, Doc seldom misses a day-game when the Cardinals or Browns are playing in St. Louis. He was in Boston the day Enos Slaughter got hit by a pitched ball in the 1946 World Series and the arm swelled up to balloon-size. Doc treated it. Two games later, Slaughter made his famous scoring dash from first to home with the Series-winning run. When reporters congratulated him, Slaughter replied: “Me, hell. If it wasn’t for [Doc], I never would’ve been on first.”