Skull Fracture Turned Drews Into Winner
"After you've been up to the majors and you go down it is never the same. The promise for Karl Drews had been bright in the post-war year of 1946, but now it was 1950 and the tall pitcher from Staten Island had gone from the Yankees to the Browns and then down to Baltimore. He'll always remember what happened that year and what happened on Memorial Day when he tried to complete the last out in the opener of the double-header.
It was a routine play. A ground ball between the pitcher's mound and first base. The Baltimore first baseman came over for the play, but he couldn't reach the grounder. Second Baseman Eddie Pellagrini raced to field the ball and Drews, making a play that pitchers make hundreds of times, sped to first to cover.
Pellagrini's throw was low and off the base. It forced Drews into a stretch and into the baseline. Dutch Mele of Syracuse, who was the runner, crashed into Karl, his pumping knee catching Drew in the left temple.
Karl never made the play. He collapsed, blood gushing from his skull. For 12 hours the bleeding couldn't be stopped and when it was finally halted, a surgeon probed into Karl's fractured skull for three bone splinters which had pierced his brain.
They found the bone fragments and removed them. In their place they put a three-by-three silver plate. They laugh about it on the Phillies bench now. It's a running gag that when Drews goes to bat he doesn't need the protection of a batting helmet, at least not on the left side of his head.
It's no longer a gag, though, about Drews' ability to pitch winning baseball and when you talk to Karl about it he traces it all back to the operation. It not only saved his life, it changed his outlook and made him what he was unable to be before.
'I lay in that hospital and wondered what was going to happen to me,' Karl said. 'I figured the accident would finish me as a pitcher and frankly I didn't care much one way or the other. I wasn't going anywhere or getting any younger. All the time I'd been in the Yankee chain I was a strange kind of guy. I worried about a heart murmur I was supposed to have. I couldn't get the ball over the plate. I was losing my taste for the game.
'Then a funny thing happened after the accident. I developed some sort of personality change. I became eager to pitch and eager to win. I became a different kind of guy off the field and a different one on it.'
By late August Karl was well enough to pitch again. Before the season was done he won six in a row. The pitcher who couldn't get the ball over the plate when he was with the Yankees and couldn't throw well enough to stay with the Browns almost miraculously became possessed of control. The Browns broke their working with Baltimore and the Phils decided to take a chance.
'When I came back to pitch,' Karl said, 'I found I couldn't hurry myself. I used to be the kind of pitcher who would throw to the plate as soon as the catcher got the ball back to me. Because of the operation, I couldn't do it; I had to save my strength. Everything I did I had to do slower. Even talking. My speech was affected an awful lot, my appetite was different. I seemed to like different things. When I pitched before was wild I'd just keep throwing faster and faster and getting wilder and wilder. Now I took my time. The ball started going where I wanted it to go. It got to be so much fun I even stopped worrying about my heart.'
When Drews became a starter with the Phils last year, few considered him of any special importance on the pitching staff. Behind Robin Roberts and Curt Simmons it would have next to impossible for him to attract too much attention. Yet even in the shadow of the Phils' great pitching duo, Drews' success managed to stand out. The season's statistics show how he really rates a place among Manager Steve O'Neill's three certain starters.
Karl's record last season was only 14-15. It is deceiving. Among his victories were five shutouts, three over the Dodgers, whom he beat four times. Among Drews' 15 defeats last year were eight in which he lost by one run.
'I'll tell you something about my pitching,' said O'Neill. I've got the three best starting pitchers in the league and I'll put Drews right up there behind Roberts and Simmons. Those two boys, of course, remind me of Lefty Grove and George Earnshaw, and Stan Coveleski and George Uhle for a two-man punch, but put that Karl in there and I've got a better big three than the Yankees have with Reynolds, Raschi and Lopat.'
I asked Steve how he accounted for Drews, a pitcher the Yankees once refused to have pitch against them in batting practice, now coming up with a 2.71 ERA.
'Control,' the pleasant Philadelphia manager said. 'He just found it somehow. He never had it before, but he's sure got it now.'"
-Milton Gross, condensed from New York Post (Baseball Digest, May 1953)
"Karl has been in baseball since 1939, and he had his best major league season last year with the Phillies. He appeared in 33 complete games, pitching in 15 complete games. He won 14 games and lost 15. However, his earned run average of 2.71, always the true test of a pitcher's effectiveness, was the seventh-lowest in the league.
He first hit the majors with the Yankees briefly at the start of the 1946 season."
-1953 Bowman No. 113
"Karl had his best big league season in 1952. He won twice as many games as he ever won before in the majors and his earned run average was topped by only six other pitchers in the National League.
Karl has been with 13 different clubs since the Yankees signed him for their Butler team in 1939. The Yanks brought him up after he posted a 19-9 record for Newark in '45. After winning 17 games for Baltimore in '51, he joined the Phillies."
-1953 Topps No. 59
No comments:
Post a Comment