"Cerv came up to the Yankees to stay in 1954 after a .317 year at Kansas City of the American Association in '53. He turned in creditable performances of .260, .341 and .304 with New York before Kansas City obtained him.
Bob got a pinch-hit home run for the Yanks in the 1955 World Series. He covers a lot of ground in the outfield for a big fellow."
-1958 Topps No.
CERV-IS WITH A SMILE
KC Star's A Happy Fellow Now
"According to tradition, the happiest ball players in captivity are those who wear the uniform of the New York Yankees. 'It's great to be young and a Yankee,' Charlie Keller once said. 'It does something to you.'
Bob Cerv felt that way seven years ago when he first dressed for a game in the soundproof airy clubhouse of the perpetual American League champions. He was 24, going on 25. He had dominated the batters of the American Association the previous season in every department. He had every expectation of winning a regular spot for himself in the Yankee outer works. Of course, there'd be the usual problems of adjustment to big league surroundings, but within a season or two he'd be up there with Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra as a Big Town star.
It never happened.
A few weeks ago Bob made his first visit of 1958 to the Stadium. He was wearing the uniform of the Kansas City Athletics, a team that had been picked for no better than a sixth-place finish this season. On his first turn at bat, he drove a home run deep into the left field stands. It was his eighth homer of the young season. He was leading that department in the majors, as well as in RBI's, with 24. He was batting .404 and feeling great feeling like the most happy feller in baseball.
Seven years is one-half of a lifetime in big league ball and, looking back on his experience with the Yankees until the end of the 1956 season, when he was sold to the A's, Bob wishes he'd originally signed not with the Yankees but with the Pirates or A's, both of whom sought his services while he was knocking fences as a collegiate star at the University of Nebraska.
'I ran into Casey Stengel's two-platoon system,' he said, as he sat in a barber chair on Seventh Avenue, just off Times Square getting a Big Town haircut, two dollars a snip plus tip. 'In left field it was a three- and four-platoon. A hitter needs regular play to get into the groove, and I never got it as a Yankee except toward the end of the 1955 season when Mickey Mantle was injured and I played about 30 straight games in center field. That year I wound up with a .341 average but the next spring I was back on the shuttle system. I can't fault the Yankee theory that every game must be won- it's good for the Yanks, but not good for a player like me.'
It is a fact that Casey, although he won't admit it now, thought he had discovered a flaw in Bob's batting style. At morning practice in 1954, Casey expressed himself volubly while watching Bob work out in the cage, to the effect that he had a hitch, dropping his hands just before he swung. But Bob denies that anyone on the Yanks, coach of manager, called his attention personally to this fault.
'I haven't changed my style since I started to play baseball,' Bob says. 'My stance, grip and swing are the same. As for my early surge this year, it's due to two factors. First, I'm playing regularly; the left field job is mine. Second, I'm in perfect physical shape for a change. Last season, my first with the A's, I injured my leg in Chicago in June. During the layoff I let my weight run up to 235, and it showed up in my averages after I went back to work. But at the end of last season, I took myself in hand and began to diet.'
If any feminine readers of Baseball Digest want Bob's weight-moving prescription, it may be had free. 'Stop drinking liquids,' Bob volunteers. 'No beer, no hard liquors and only enough water to satisfy your thirst. No bread, potatoes or other starches but all the meat and green vegetables you want- ham and eggs for breakfast; steaks, chops and poultry for dinner. But- only two meals a day ... breakfast and dinner ... and don't snack in between.'
However, there's a gimmick in Bob's diet. 'I guess I'm an old-fashioned type. I like to hunt. Hunting makes you walk a lot, keeps you in the open air. That, and the diet, knocked off the poundage and I arrived in the A's camp this spring feeling great.'
Bob's enthusiasm for the A's is not just a passing fancy. Like Eddie Mathews, who played for the Milwaukee Brewers in the American Association and then returned to Milwaukee as a Brave, Bob began his baseball career as a Kansas City Blue in 1950 and returned there as an Athletic in 1957. Between times he shuttled back and forth between New York and Kansas City, while the Yankees still owned the Blues as a Triple-A farm club. 'I might still be shuttling to and fro if my options hadn't run out,' he says, which led Bob to express some opinions about the option system. 'A player like myself, arriving in the majors on a team which has no special need for him, suddenly finds himself bouncing back and forth until he's labeled as a might-have-been. He never gets a chance to show his real stuff in season-long competition. By the time the options have run out, he has wasted the potential he once had. It's no fun waking up at 32 and finding yourself playing regularly for the first time.'
Kansas City suits Bob better than New York. His home is in Lincoln, Nebraska, 200 miles away, which it makes it unnecessary for him to support two establishments, winter and summer, if he is to enjoy family life.
And Harry Craft suits him as a manager. 'I played for Harry when he managed the Blues,' he says. 'He knows what I can do, and I know what he expects. All he expects is that for two and a half hours each day, while you're playing ball, you are to play top ball. That means running out all hits and going after flies whether you think you can catch them as they start from the bat or not. That's all Harry wants, and it's getting results.'
Bob likes left field in Kansas City's Municipal Stadium better than the same area at Yankee Stadium. 'Gene Woodling said the other day the Stadium left field is the worst in the majors. It's a fact that the three tiers at the Stadium form a poor background for judging a fly ball- you don't really see it when the stands are crowded until it rises above the third tier and is against the sky. The situation of the Stadium in line with the setting sun creates shadows late in the afternoon, especially toward the end of the season. Perhaps that is why so many Yankee left fielders have failed to get a grip on themselves, and no one of them has held the job regularly in many seasons.'
Thus with happier playing conditions, happier relations with the management, and a chance to play regularly, Bob is hopeful of dominating American League batters this year as he did the American Association in 1951. He is a solidly built six-footer, dark-haired, blue-eyed, easy-smiling and well-spoken- and equipped with an above-average education for a professional baseball player, most of whom, if they've attended college, have majored in physical education.
'My parents are of Czech extraction,' he says. 'Although they were both born in this country. Dad is a truck driver- we lived in Weston, Nebraska, and my main sports interest used to be basketball, not baseball.
'I was playing basketball in high school when Tony Sharpe, our coach, who also coached the baseball team, asked me if I would catch for him, as he had no one for that position. I caught for a while but didn't hit the long ball until Tony shifted me to the outfield.
Then, when I was 17, the United States got into the war, and nothing could stop me from getting into a uniform at once. I didn't know what the war was about- I just wanted an adventure, and I got it. I enlisted and was assigned to the USS Claxton, a destroyer on radar duty in the Pacific, with a beat from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. I wanted action, and we got plenty of it- Japanese aircraft attacks and battle service off Leyte.
'I came out of the war with no illusions, no complexes. The GI Bill of Rights offered me an education and I decided to become a teacher. All my courses were to that end, and I was graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in education. If I hadn't been on the basketball and baseball teams I would have become a teacher at once, for I had a certificate and there were numerous openings in Nebraska.
'Instead, I was hitting around .500 in college baseball, and scouts were making tempting offers. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I knew the chances for quick success in the majors were better with a second-division team like the A's or the Pirates. But the Yankees came along with the proposition that I would be signed for immediate service with a Triple-A club, in this case, Kansas City. So I signed for a $6,000 check, and that was it.
'As I know now, my original hunch was correct. Whatever my faults in 1952, I would have had a better chance of overcoming them if I had been allowed to develop day by day in play- bench-warming does something to you, and going up and down, from the majors and back to the minors, isn't conducive to morale-building. I had the normal bad breaks with the Yankees. I jammed my knee one year; I missed many opportunities to do better. I liked the team, the players, and New York. But, except for 1955 when Mantle was hurt, I could never report with the certain knowledge that I was to play a complete game. Now, I can.'
Bob married Phyllis Pelton while both of the young folks were undergraduates at Nebraska. Sithay- "That's a family name of my wife's"- and Sandra were already born when Bob first joined the Yankees. Sithay is now ten, Sandra, nine, and the Cerv household in Lincoln is now noisy with Denise, seven, Karen, six; and then the boys, Bob, Jr., four, and Joe, two. In August there'll be a seventh little Cerv.
The family followed Bob to New York in his Yankee days, but now they stay in Lincoln, 'where we've got a big house because we need one,' he says.
As for the extracurricular activities that keep Yankees busy, Bob neither envies nor disdains them. 'I've never told this before, because I don't think it's important, but I do own a cafe and bar in a little mining town in Colorado- Gunnison. It's so small that you can't find it on a map. A friend of mine offered the cafe to me several years ago for a small investment. I kept a hand in it for two years, until it began to make money. Now it's being run for me, and doing well. But that's my only interest outside of baseball.
'The future? I don't worry about that. If it's ever necessary, I can go back to the University of Nebraska, take a few refresher courses and renew my teacher's certificate.'
In the meantime, Bob Cerv is manufacturing singles, doubles, triples, homers and RBI's on a wholesale scale- and is the most happy feller this reporter has met in baseball in quite some time."
-Charles Dexter (Baseball Digest, July 1958)
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