Buddy Rosar

In July 1942, Buddy Rosar walked out on the Yankees mid-pennant race to take a police exam. He came back a hero to nobody in the front office and was gone from the Bronx within six months. That's the kind of career Warren Vincent "Buddy" Rosar had -- quietly excellent, occasionally chaotic, and never quite the headline act.

The Kid Behind Dickey

Rosar broke into the majors on April 29, 1939, a 24-year-old catcher out of Buffalo stuck behind Bill Dickey, one of the best backstops the game has ever produced (a future Hall of Famer with 11 All-Star nods of his own). There isn't a worse spot on a roster to be young and talented. Rosar played sparingly that first year, watching from the bench as the Yankees won it all, then started carving out real time in 1940 as Dickey, at 33, needed the occasional rest.

He made the most of it. Rosar hit .298 that season, a career year, with a .357 on-base percentage and 37 RBI in just 73 games -- numbers that would've made him a regular on most rosters in baseball. Instead they made him the best bench player on a stacked one.

On July 19, 1940, Rosar hit for the cycle against Cleveland, still the only Yankees catcher ever to do it. The day before, he'd hit a grand slam. Two career days out of a backup catcher, back to back, and he still couldn't crack the lineup on a permanent basis. Dickey's job was that safe.

The Walkout

The 1942 season ended Rosar's time in New York, and it didn't end quietly. With his wife expecting and a wartime economy making every ballplayer think about what came next (baseball's future was genuinely uncertain in 1942), Rosar asked Joe McCarthy for a few days off to get back to Buffalo -- to be there for the birth and to sit for the city's police entrance exam. McCarthy said no. Dickey was hurt, and the Yankees needed a catcher.

Rosar went anyway, right after a July 18 win over the White Sox. His son was born two days later. Team president Ed Barrow wanted him traded on the spot; McCarthy talked the punishment down to a $250 fine instead. It didn't matter much in the end. That December, the Yankees shipped Rosar and outfielder Roy Cullenbine to Cleveland for Roy Weatherly and Oscar Grimes. Four years behind Dickey, and he left the way he'd spent most of it -- overshadowed, this time by his own headline.

The Best Glove Nobody Talks About

Cleveland is where Rosar became something the Yankees never quite let him be: the guy. He made his first All-Star team in 1942 as a Yankee (his last summer in pinstripes), then made four more with Cleveland and Philadelphia. The A's are where his defense turned into legend -- in 1946, he played all 117 of his games at catcher without a single error, an MLB record at the time. He kept it going into 1947, running the errorless streak to 147 straight games before a dropped popup ended it on May 20 -- the longest errorless run by a catcher in the game's history up to that point. Later catchers (Mike Redmond ran his to 253) have since passed it, but in 1947, nobody had ever caught that clean for that long.

Rosar retired in 1951 with the Red Sox, a .261 hitter who made a living with his glove more than his bat. He died in 1994, back home in the Rochester area, a long way from Yankee Stadium and the four years he spent waiting for Bill Dickey to need a day off.