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Thursday December 12, 2024

Rocky Colavito (1933-2024)

His 1960 Topps baseball card, before the curse.

Here's a confession for which I'll probably have to hand in my SABR card: I sometimes get Rocky Colavito and Ted Kluszewski mixed up. Both were power hitters for Ohio teams with “C” caps in the 1950s (i.e., before I was born), who got traded around and never won an MVP nor made the Hall of Fame nor crashed a big number like 500 career homeruns. Both were big (Rock: 6'3“, 190; Klu: 6'2”, 225) with names that sounded big, but Kluszewski was the guy who cut off the sleeves of his jerseys because his biceps were too big. I sometimes thought that was Colavito. Klu was Polish, a first baseman, and nearly 10 years older; Rocky was Italian, and a right fielder who grew up in New York idolizing Joe DiMaggio. 

Another difference: Kluszewski went to Indiana University, where he was discovered by the Reds groundskeeper, while Colavito never finished high school. He left at age 16 to play semipro ball. “He would spend the rest of his life telling kids not to follow in his footsteps,” Joe Posnanski writes in his beautiful obit.

Rocco Domenico Colavito was born in 1933 and came up for a cup of coffee in 1955, the year after Cleveland won a pennant. That would be a theme: missing the postseason. In his rookie season he slashed a .276/.372/.531 line, with 21 homers and more walks than strikeouts (49-46), but he finished second to White Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio in Rookie of the Year honors. That would be another theme: never quite getting the accolade. Two years later he finished third in MVP voting despite 41 homers, a 1.024 OPS, and a Major-league leading .620 slugging percentage. The next year he led the league in homers and total bases but finished fourth in MVP voting to three players on the resurgent Go-Go White Sox—including Aparicio. But he did make the cover of TIME magazine in an article about young players in the grand old game.

His trade to Detroit two days before the start of the 1960 season became the stuff of legend. He didn't want to go (he loved Cleveland), the fans didn't want him to go (Cleveland loved him), but general manager Frank Lane felt, as he said, “The home run is overrated.” Thus Colavito, the 1959 homerun champ, was traded for Harvey Kuenn, the 1959 batting champ. If you squint, and are cold-blooded, it kinda makes sense. Overall, Kuenn had led the league in hits four times, in doubles three times, and batting average once, and he was coming off that .353 season, so if you felt BA > HR, as Lane apparently did, then pull that trigger no matter what the fans felt. If you win a championship, they'll forgive you. Cf., Nomar and the 2004 Red Sox.

Cleveland didn't win a championship. They went from 89-65 in 1959, second in the league, to 76-78, fourth, and wouldn't make the postseason again until .... wait for it ... 1995. Fans traced it all to the Colavito trade. It became known as “The Curse of Rocky Colavito.” Books were written.

I love this litany of fan anger, per Posnanski, upon hearing the news:

  • “My teeth almost fell out,” South Euclid's Marvin Jones said.
  • “I'll never go to the ballpark again,” Robert Intorocio on 165th Street said.
  • “Tie Lane to a boxcar and run him out of Cleveland,” 88th Street's William Scott suggested.
  • “The most stupid thing I ever heard,” Beachwood's David Magner said.
  • “I belong to one of the Rocky Colavito fan clubs,” eighth grader Carol Kickel said, “It's all over. We're going to start a new one, the Lane Haters.”

It didn't help that in 1960 Kuenn was less effective than he'd been, .308 with no power, and it also didn't help that Lane turned right around and traded him to the San Francisco Giants for Johnny Antonelli, a pitcher who went 0-4 with a 6.56 ERA and was gone, and Willie Kirkland, an outfielder who lasted three years with the team, slashing a .232/.299/.414 line. “I felt this trade would help us,” Lane said, “because it gives us a starting pitcher and an outfielder who hits with power.” Kirkland was eventually traded for half a season of Al Smith, meaning this is what the Indians got for their beloved player by bWAR:

  • One season of Kuenn: 2.4
  • Half a season of Antonelli: -1.1
  • Three seasons of Kirkland: 3.6
  • Half a season of Smith: -0.9
  • TOTAL: 4.0

This is versus about 22 bWAR for the rest of Colavito's career, which included leading the league in total bases in 1962, and in RBIs in 1966. The latter was when he was back in Cleveland. He also played for the KC A's (in 1964), the White Sox ('67), and Dodgers/Yankees ('68). He never went to the postseason.

Remember in Ken Burns' “Baseball” doc when Bob Costas mentions how all his father's friends said stuff like, “You never saw DiMaggio, kid, you never saw the real thing”? Posnanski got that in Cleveland about Colavito. “The recurring theme of my Cleveland childhood was that I had arrived at the party too late,” Pos writes, “that I had missed all the good stuff, I had missed Jim Brown running through defenders, and I had missed Bob Feller and Sudden Sam McDowell throwing fastballs at the speed of sound, and I had missed Lou the Toe Groza booting the football when successful field goals felt like something of a magic trick. 'Aw,' adults would tell me, 'you shoulda seen the Rock play.'”

Except, in a way, he did. This is how he begins his obit:

When I was 10 years old—that most magical time for baseball fans—I saw a 44-year-old baseball coach (he looked so much older to me then) stand at home plate at Cleveland Municipal Stadium and throw a baseball over the centerfield wall. It remains to this day the closest I've come to actually seeing Superman fly or Spiderman climb or Bugs Bunny defy the laws of gravity (because he never studied law). The throw was a feat so mind-boggling, so utterly impossible, that for years I would actually dream about it, only in the dreams I was that coach at home plate, and I would throw the ball, and it would never come down.

The coach was Rocky Colavito.

Posted at 05:38 PM on Thursday December 12, 2024 in category Baseball