Bud Metheny

October 6, 1943. Top of the fourth, Game 2 of the World Series, Yankee Stadium. The Cardinals' Ray Sanders lifts a high fly to deep right field, the kind of ball a right fielder is supposed to catch. Bud Metheny gets a glove on it. The ball glances off the tip and drops into the seats for a home run. St. Louis wins the only game they'd win all Series, 4-3, and Metheny -- 0-for-3 that afternoon, reaching base just once, on catcher's interference -- becomes the goat of a game the Yankees didn't need to lose.

It's the kind of moment that could define a career. For Metheny, it barely made a dent. He'd been a New York Yankees regular for exactly one summer at that point, handed a starting outfield job because Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Red Ruffing and Tommy Henrich were all off fighting a war, and a bad knee kept him stateside instead. He'd play four seasons in pinstripes, start in a World Series that turned out fine anyway, and vanish from the lineup card the exact week the real Yankees started coming home. That's the whole shape of the story -- opportunity, competence, replacement -- and it's worth telling straight, because almost nobody bothers to anymore.

From the Mound to Right Field

Arthur Beauregard Metheny was born June 1, 1915, in St. Louis, and grew up wanting to pitch. Elbow trouble ended that plan early, so he moved to the outfield and kept playing -- semipro ball in Culpeper, Virginia, and up in Vermont, wherever a paycheck and a lineup card turned up. He enrolled at the College of William & Mary, and it was there, in June 1938, that Yankees scout Gene McCann signed him.

The Yankees sent him to the Norfolk Tars of the Class B Piedmont League that same year, and Metheny put up the best power numbers of his life before he'd ever seen a big-league mound -- .338 with 21 home runs in 89 games, a season he'd never quite match again at any level (majors included). Five years of minor-league seasoning followed. He was 27 years old, buried behind DiMaggio and Henrich on the organizational depth chart, with no obvious path to New York.

Then came spring training 1943, and manager Joe McCarthy still didn't particularly want him -- Metheny's draft status was uncertain, and McCarthy leaned toward Johnny Lindell, Roy Weatherly, and Tuck Stainback instead. Metheny made his case the only way a fringe outfielder can: he tripled over Joe Medwick's head in an exhibition game against Brooklyn, the hardest-hit ball of the afternoon. It got him a longer look. What actually kept him on the roster was a medical rejection -- an old knee surgery disqualified him from military service, at a moment when that disqualification was the only thing standing between him and a bench role.

The Wartime Regular

Metheny debuted on April 27, 1943, and spent the first two months as a fringe piece, playing sparingly behind whoever McCarthy trusted more. Then the war caught up with the roster. DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Ruffing and Henrich were all gone by midseason, and the Yankees turned to their farm system to fill the gaps -- Metheny in right field, Frank Crosetti and rookie Snuffy Stirnweiss at shortstop, Butch Wensloff in the rotation. None of them were stars (that's rather the point of a wartime roster). They didn't need to be, not with Charlie Keller hitting 31 home runs and Bill Dickey anchoring the infield behind the plate.

The rookie year ended at .261/.333/.397 with 9 home runs and 36 RBI in 103 games -- a perfectly useful complementary line on a team that won the pennant by 13.5 games and didn't ask him to be anything more.

Then came the World Series rematch with St. Louis, the same club that had upset the Yankees a year earlier. Metheny started Games 2 and 5. Game 2 gave him the misjudged Sanders fly ball and an 0-for-3 afternoon. Game 5 gave him a measure of redemption he didn't really need -- a 1-for-5 day with two strikeouts, in a game Spud Chandler closed out with a complete-game shutout and Dickey put away with a sixth-inning two-run homer. Yankees win the Series, 4 games to 1. Metheny finishes 1-for-8. He gets a ring regardless.

The Year He Blamed Himself

1944 was Metheny's best power season and, by his own reckoning, his worst year in pinstripes. He hit a career-high 14 home runs and drove in 67 runs across 137 games -- and hit just .239, while leading all American League outfielders with 11 errors. The Yankees finished third, six games behind the St. Louis Browns, and Metheny reportedly went home that winter convinced his batting average had cost New York the pennant. It's the kind of self-blame that tells you more about a wartime role player's mindset than any box score could -- these were men keenly aware they were standing in for somebody better, and every slump felt like proof of it.

Joe Gordon and the rest of the holdover core kept the Yankees competitive that year regardless, part of the broader pattern of replacement-level production filling in for absent stars across the league during 1944 and 1945. Metheny wasn't unique in that sense -- he was one of dozens of wartime fill-ins across baseball doing exactly the same job, with exactly the same shelf life once the war ended.

1945 was steadier. Metheny started every game in right field, hit .248 with 8 home runs and 53 RBI in 133 games, and put together an 18-for-40 stretch (a .450 clip) during a 10-game hitting streak that began July 10 -- as good a run as he'd have in a Yankees uniform. It just came a year before the door closed on him for good.

The Door Closes

1946 arrived, and with it, DiMaggio, Henrich and Keller all back in pinstripes. Metheny appeared in three games, went hitless, and played his final major-league game on May 9, 1946. There was no controversy in it, no trade, no injury story -- just a roster that had its real outfield back and no further use for the man who'd covered right field while it was gone. He'd worn uniform No. 3, one of the last Yankees to do so before it was retired for Babe Ruth two years later.

Thirty-Two Years in Norfolk

Metheny's second act outlasted his first by a wide margin. He joined the athletic staff at the Norfolk Division of the College of William & Mary in 1948, coaching baseball and basketball as the school grew into its own identity as Old Dominion. He stayed 32 years -- head baseball coach the entire stretch, head basketball coach from 1948 to 1965, and athletic director from 1963 to 1970.

The baseball résumé alone justified the tenure: a 423-363-6 record, National Coach of the Year honors in 1964, and a Virginia State Championship in 1980, his final season on the job. He got into the William & Mary Hall of Fame, the Old Dominion Hall of Fame, the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame, and the American Association of College Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame -- four halls of fame (nobody in the Bronx put him in one).

He died January 2, 2003, at 87. Old Dominion's baseball program still carries his name into its own record books, decades after most of the 1943 box scores that made him briefly, unmistakably a Yankee got filed away and forgotten.

Four seasons, one ring, a misjudged fly ball, and a door that closed the week the war ended. Metheny never complained about the timing, at least not on the record -- he just went home to Norfolk and spent the next three decades building something that outlasted every box score he ever put up in pinstripes.