Bill Skowron

October 10, 1956. Ebbets Field, Game 7 of the World Series. Johnny Kucks had the Dodgers shut down, Yogi Berra had already gone deep twice, and in the seventh inning Bill Skowron stepped in with the bases loaded and buried a Roger Craig fastball into the stands. Grand slam. Final score, 9-0. Skowron played first base for the New York Yankees from 1954 to 1962, won four World Series rings in the Bronx, and then won a fifth with the team that beat his old one.

Purdue to the Bronx

William Joseph Skowron was born December 18, 1930, in Chicago, the son of Polish immigrants. As a kid, his grandfather gave him a haircut that made him look like Benito Mussolini. The neighborhood kids started calling him "Mussolini." His family shortened it to something more manageable: "Moose."

He went to Purdue on a football scholarship -- blocking back, punter, the whole package -- and made varsity in three sports as a sophomore. His freshman coach was Hank Stram, years before Stram became a Hall of Fame NFL coach in Kansas City. Skowron also hit .500 on the Purdue baseball team that year, a Big Ten record that stood for a decade. Baseball, it turned out, was the sport he was actually built for.

In 1950, Yankees scout Joe McDermott spotted him playing semipro ball in southern Minnesota and brought him in for a look at Comiskey Park. Skowron signed on the spot, skipped his return to West Lafayette for winter ball in Puerto Rico instead, and left Purdue's football coach fuming about "thievery." He always said he regretted not finishing his degree (he never did go back for it). He never regretted the trade-off.

Yankees Career

Skowron debuted April 13, 1954, and hit .340 as a rookie -- 7 home runs, 41 RBI in just 87 games behind Joe Collins. By the back half of the decade he wasn't behind anybody. He became the Yankees' regular first baseman on some of the best teams the franchise ever fielded, a run-producer in a lineup that already had Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra doing plenty of damage on their own.

His career-high season came in 1961, when he hit 28 home runs -- one of six Yankees to clear 20 that year, in the same lineup that watched Roger Maris chase Babe Ruth's record. Skowron didn't need the headlines. He had four rings by then and a manager who trusted him in the middle of the order (not bad for a semipro tip a scout happened to chase down in southern Minnesota).

Four Rings, One Swing at a Time

Skowron's championships weren't quiet ones. In the 1958 World Series, with the Yankees down 3-1 to the Braves and staring at elimination, they broke a 2-2 tie in Game 7 on Elston Howard's go-ahead single, then Skowron blew the game open with a three-run homer off Lew Burdette, sealing a 6-2 win and the title. Burdette had no excuses. "It was a lousy pitch that I gave Skowron," he admitted afterward.

In 1961, Skowron hit .353 with a home run and 5 RBI as the Yankees dispatched the Reds. In Game 7 of the 1962 World Series against the Giants at Candlestick Park, he singled, moved to third on Clete Boyer's single, and scored the only run of the game on a double-play grounder. Yankees won 1-0. Ralph Terry took the MVP trophy, but Skowron had crossed the plate that mattered.

Four championships in nine seasons. Then, on November 26, 1962, the Yankees traded him to the Los Angeles Dodgers for pitcher Stan Williams -- a swap made because Joe Pepitone was ready to take over first base. Skowron's average collapsed to .203 in his lone year in Los Angeles.

The Fifth Ring

October came anyway. The 1963 Dodgers swept his old team in four straight games, and Skowron -- the guy Los Angeles picked up almost as an afterthought -- hit .385 in the series, including a fourth-inning home run in Game 2 that helped seal a 4-1 win. He'd spent nine years building championships in pinstripes. Now he had a fifth ring, earned by helping bury the team that gave him the first four.

He bounced from the Dodgers to the Senators to the White Sox to the Angels over his final four seasons, a common enough fade for a slugger past thirty. He retired after the 1967 season with 211 career home runs and 888 RBI. In 1999, the White Sox brought him back as a community relations representative, a job he held until he died of congestive heart failure on April 27, 2012, in Arlington Heights, Illinois. He was 81.

Skowron isn't in Cooperstown, and he probably never will be. He doesn't have Mantle's power or Berra's résumé, and he spent his best years playing alongside both of them, which made it easy for the ledger to undersell him (Cooperstown has never been kind to the best complementary piece on a great team). But four championships in nine seasons is four championships in nine seasons. Nobody's grand slam off Roger Craig gets any smaller with time.