Bob Cerv

Mickey Mantle hit 54 home runs for the Yankees in 1961. Roger Maris hit 61. The third man living in their rented Queens apartment that summer hit 6 -- and spent the rest of his life telling people it was still the best seat in the house.

That third man was Bob Cerv, and the apartment story is the reason casual fans know his name at all. It sells him short. Cerv played parts of twelve big-league seasons, won a World Series ring with the Yankees, hit a home run total that set the Kansas City Athletics' single-season franchise record, and did it while his jaw was wired shut. He also happened to hit the batting-practice liner that started Gil McDougald down the road to near-total hearing loss, and he was the outfielder the Yankees got back for Andy Carey in 1960. Cerv shows up in everybody else's story. This one is his.

Nebraska's Four-Letter Man

Robert Henry Cerv was born May 5, 1925, in Weston, Nebraska, the only son of a truck driver. The family name is Bohemian in origin -- pronounced "Cherf" -- and got Americanized to "Serve" somewhere along the way (either a baseball pun waiting to happen or a coincidence, take your pick). He served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, then enrolled at the University of Nebraska and became the only Cornhusker ever to earn four letters each in basketball and baseball -- back-to-back Big Seven basketball titles in 1949 and 1950, a four-year run as a baseball starter, and the distinction of being the first Husker to reach the majors.

The Yankees signed him in 1950, at 25, old enough that they skipped the low minors entirely and sent him straight to Triple-A Kansas City. He debuted in the Bronx on August 1, 1951. For the next four seasons he was exactly what a reserve outfielder was supposed to be on a team that already had DiMaggio's replacements sorted out -- a late-inning defensive man, an occasional pinch-hitter, a guy who played 8 games in 1953 and didn't get a hit in 6 at-bats. Nobody was building a Hall of Fame case for Bob Cerv. He wasn't trying to.

A Line Drive Nobody Meant to Throw

In mid-August 1955, before a home game, McDougald was standing near the batting cage at second base, chatting with coach Frankie Crosetti, when he bent down to grab a stray ball lying in the grass. Cerv, taking his cuts, pulled a line drive that caught McDougald flush in the ear. Doctors diagnosed a mild concussion. McDougald missed a couple of games and came back like nothing had happened.

What nobody caught that day was a small skull fracture and damage to his inner ear. The hearing loss came on slowly, then not so slowly -- McDougald was nearly deaf by the 1980s, kept it quiet until a 1994 interview, and finally got a cochlear implant that gave some of it back. Cerv never hit the ball on purpose, obviously, and by every account the two stayed on fine terms. But it's the kind of accident a batting-practice pitcher never entirely forgets throwing to.

A Ring, Then a Sale

Cerv's real postseason showcase actually came a year before his ring. In the 1955 World Series, he started regularly against Brooklyn, going 2-for-16 with a home run as the Yankees lost in seven games. The next October, in the 1956 rematch, he got just one pinch-hit at-bat -- a single off Sal Maglie in Game 1, a game the Dodgers won 6-3 before New York rallied to take the Series in seven. Don Larsen's perfect game in Game 5 got the headlines. But that 1956 Series is the one that mattered most for Cerv: it's the only ring he ever got.

It didn't buy him a longer look. On October 15, 1956, the Yankees sold him outright to the Kansas City Athletics. New York had a crowded outfield and Cerv, at 31, was an extra part. Kansas City had at-bats to give him.

The Wired Jaw

Kansas City turned out to be exactly what Cerv needed. Regular at-bats, an everyday job in left field, and in 1958, at 33 years old, the best year anybody ever got out of him. He hit .304, drove in 104 runs, and slugged 38 home runs -- a mark that stood as the Kansas City Athletics' single-season franchise record until the franchise left for Oakland after the 1967 season (Jorge Soler would eventually hit more, 48, but not until 2019, for the expansion Royals). He made the All-Star team and started in left field on July 8 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, where he crashed into the wall to rob Del Crandall of extra bases in the sixth inning of a game the American League won 4-3.

He did most of that season with a broken jaw. Trying to score from second against Detroit at Municipal Stadium, Cerv chose to bowl over Tigers catcher Red Wilson instead of sliding. His jaw lost that argument. He played more than a month with it wired shut, living on a liquid diet, and hit six of his 38 home runs during that stretch. Whatever else you want to say about the man, he did not let a broken face slow down a career year.

Back to the Bronx for Andy Carey

The Yankees still had first refusal on Cerv, in a sense -- they knew what he was and knew they missed it. On May 19, 1960, they traded third baseman Andy Carey to Kansas City to get him back, a swap Carey's own bio on this site covers from the other direction. Carey had been the Yankees' regular third baseman for most of a decade, but a kid named Clete Boyer had made him expendable. Cerv, at 35, came back to New York a wiser hitter than the one who'd left.

He didn't stay put for long. That December 14, the expansion Los Angeles Angels selected him in the 1960 expansion draft, and Cerv became an original Angel -- he hit a home run in the first inning of the first game in franchise history. It lasted less than five months. On May 8, 1961, the Angels flipped him back to New York in a five-player deal, sending Cerv and pitcher Tex Clevenger to the Yankees for Lee Thomas, Ryne Duren, and Johnny James. Cerv had now been a Yankee, an Athletic, an Angel, and a Yankee again inside of five years (the itinerant life of a useful bat without a starting job to call his own).

The Fullest House in Queens

That return to New York is what put Cerv's name in the history books for good. He and Roger Maris had been teammates and roommates back in Kansas City before Maris was ever traded to New York, and once the May 1960 trade reunited them in pinstripes, Cerv moved in with Maris at a rented apartment in Queens, not far from the Forest Hills tennis stadium. Mickey Mantle joined the arrangement too. The lease reportedly belonged to Julie Isaacson, a boxing manager and union organizer who became one of Maris's closest friends in the city -- introduced to him, by most accounts, through Cerv.

By the summer of 1961 that apartment held the most famous home run chase in the sport's history under one roof, and Cerv had a front-row cot for all of it (rent was probably the least interesting line item in that place's budget that summer). The 1961 season ended with Maris breaking Babe Ruth's single-season record at 61, Mantle finishing at 54 before injuries caught up with him in September, and Cerv -- mostly a pinch-hitter that year after his bouncing 1960-61 -- adding 6 of his own. Sixty-one, fifty-four, and six is still cited as the most home runs three players living together ever combined for in one season. "The three of us lived together," Cerv said, "and I was the only one who didn't make a run at Ruth." He wasn't wrong, and he didn't sound like he minded.

The Last Out

Cerv played into 1962, mostly off the bench, before the Yankees traded him to the expansion Houston Colt .45s that June. Houston released him in July. His final major league game came on July 29, 1962, twelve seasons and four teams after he'd debuted with the Yankees as a 26-year-old outfielder nobody expected much from.

He went home to Nebraska and stayed in the game. Cerv coached at John F. Kennedy College in Wahoo for ten years starting in 1966, later coached at a junior college in Hawarden, Iowa, and spent ten summers managing the semipro Liberal, Kansas BeeJays, taking them to the National Baseball Congress World Series finals three times. He died on April 6, 2017, in Blair, Nebraska, at 91.

Bob Cerv hit six home runs in 1961, fewest of anybody living in that Queens apartment. He also lived through the whole thing -- the pizza, the beer, the reporters camped outside, two teammates chasing a ghost all summer -- and came out the other side with the best line of anybody involved: he was the one who didn't make a run at Ruth, and he seemed just fine with that.