Sport: Burt’s Catcher

“The Lord,” said old Burt Shotton piously, “made him a good catcher. He’ll be another Bill Dickey some day.” The white-haired manager of the Dodgers, who sometimes sounds like Scattergood

Baines in a baseball cap, was getting off some cracker-barrel confidences on 27-year-old Roy Campanella, his prize backstop and early season big-stick of the hustling Brooklyn Dodgers.

It had been a long time since baseball had had anybody in the same class with the great Yankee catcher: Bill Dickey had a baseball mind like an index file, a deadly whip of a throwing arm, and a booming bat (lifetime batting average: .314). Burt Shotton was predicting a lot when he said he saw another Dickey in his own ball yard, but there was no question about one fact: Brooklyn’s Campanella, the third Negro to make a regular berth for himself in the majors, was last week the best catcher in the National League and one of the best in baseball.

“Help the Umpire.” Campanella, a broad-beamed, quick-footed man with a sharp ballplayer’s mind and reflexes, was hitting as he had never hit before. In 83 games with the Dodgers last year he turned in an indifferent .258. Last week he was leading both leagues with a hefty .400. Campy was not sure that it would last, but he credited his sizzling performance to a new open batting stance worked out in spring training. He almost faces the pitcher now, with his left foot in the bucket, and he has stopped trying to knock every pitch out of the park. (“When you don’t make the big swing, you see the ball all the way”).

Behind the plate Campy looks like the lowest man on a totem pole and offers a steady, chunky 194-lb. target. More than most catchers today, he works out of a low squat. Says Campy: “I hate for balls to get by me with men on base, so I sit down closer to them.” That way, too, he can block low pitches, and “help the umpire.” When a catcher is squatting low, he thinks, an umpire is more likely to call strikes because he has a better chance to see them.

“Home & Find Out.” Dodger pitchers have a healthy respect for the way smart, confident Roy Campanella handles them. “Roy really settles you down,” said Lefty Joe Hatten last week. “If I get mad or get working too fast, he takes my mind off it.” Added Elwin (“Preacher”) Roe, “When I’m working too fast, Campy makes the trip out to the mound to kill time.” Campy says something like this: “Pay that no mind, get this fellow out,” or “Maybe your wife has something for ya’ at home; you better get this game over and get home quick and find out.”

Would-be base-stealers respect him too. In his last 21 games of the 1948 season twelve men tried sneaking a base on him. He threw them all out. In the first 17 games he has caught this year, only six have tried it, and Campy caught three of them. While a 50-50 average is not as good as his record last year, it is just about par for the course.

Home & to Bed. Campanella got to be a catcher for two reasons: 1) he was a born athlete and 2) none of the other kids in his Philadelphia neighborhood ever wanted to catch. In his junior year at Simon Gratz High School (where he had already won letters in baseball, football, basketball and track), the Negro Bacharach Giants offered him $50 a weekend. That was the end of school as far as Campy was concerned. After he left the Bacharach Giants, he went with the Baltimore Elite Giants, backstopped in the eastern U.S., Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela and Cuba in the next few years.

The Dodgers picked up Campanella in 1946, gave him his minor-league training at Nashua, N.H. and Montreal. This year, except in one game of a doubleheader, Burt Shotton hasn’t used anyone but Campanella behind the plate.

Fame and money (about $10,000 this year) haven’t made much difference in Campy’s style of living. With his wife Ruthe and four children (two of them girls) he lives in a white clapboard house in St. Albans, Queens, goes in for big plates of Ruthe’s spaghetti, gets to bed most nights by 10 p.m. and is up by 6 a.m.: “In my house,” he says, “you got to keep regular hours. The baby, Roy Jr., he’s up by then and hittin’ the bottle.”