Frankie Crosetti

Frank Crosetti won 17 World Series championships wearing a Yankees uniform -- eight as a shortstop, nine more as a third base coach -- more than anyone else who ever played or coached the game. He isn't in the Hall of Fame. Most fans who can name every Yankee shortstop from Rizzuto forward have never heard of him. That gap between his ring count and his name recognition is the whole story of Frank Crosetti.

North Beach to the Pacific Coast League

Crosetti was born October 4, 1910, in San Francisco, and grew up in North Beach, an Italian immigrant neighborhood that also produced Tony Lazzeri and the DiMaggio brothers -- Crosetti was a Yankee before Joe DiMaggio was, and the same scouting pipeline that found him would find DiMaggio a few years later. His father had come over from Genoa and worked as a gardener before saving enough to run a small vegetable farm, where young Frank and an older brother played catch with a homemade bat cut from a board and a ball fashioned out of a dried corn cob. He dropped out of high school around 16, kicked around semipro ball in Montana for a stretch, then came home to San Francisco and caught on with the Seals.

The Seals almost didn't sign him. Crosetti was considered too small for a professional contract, so the club reportedly sent him milk every morning until he added ten pounds (not exactly a modern strength program, but it worked). He hit a grand slam in his first professional at-bat, an exhibition game against the Pirates, then settled into a .248 rookie season in 1928. He moved to shortstop the next year and his average jumped to .314. By 1930 he was hitting .334 with 27 home runs, leading the Pacific Coast League in runs scored. Yankees scout Bill Essick had seen enough. He convinced owner Jacob Ruppert to buy Crosetti outright, and on August 23, 1930, the deal went through: $75,000 cash and three players -- Julie Wera, Bill Henderson, and Sam Gibson -- for a 19-year-old shortstop the Yankees wouldn't even bring east for another year (real money in 1930, for a player they hadn't seen play a single big-league game). Crosetti spent 1931 finishing his apprenticeship in San Francisco, batting cleanup for the only time in his career and hitting .343.

Winning From the Start

He arrived in the Bronx in 1932 wanting the starting shortstop job outright. Manager Joe McCarthy wasn't ready to hand it to a 21-year-old and started veteran Lyn Lary there instead, using Crosetti mostly at third. It didn't matter where he played that October -- the Yankees swept the Cubs in the World Series, and Crosetti had his first ring before he'd turned 22.

The next few seasons were rougher. By 1935 he was committing too many errors and striking out too often, and a knee injury ended his season early. He used the recovery time to rework his batting stance. McCarthy, meanwhile, had been shuffling his infield -- Red Rolfe missed the start of 1934 with a case of hip boils, and by the time he'd healed, McCarthy had moved Tony Lazzeri back to second base and Crosetti back to shortstop, settling Rolfe in at third for the next nine years. The alignment stuck. Crosetti's new stance stuck too. In 1936, he had the best season of his career -- a .288 average, 15 home runs, 78 RBI, and a league-leading 137 runs scored in 151 games -- and made his first All-Star team.

What Crosetti gave the lineup wasn't power. It was outs he didn't make. He walked nearly 800 times in his career against a .245 batting average, which is its own kind of skill -- staying in front of Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio in the order meant somebody had to get on base ahead of them, and Crosetti built a career out of doing exactly that. He also had a habit of leading the league in getting hit by pitches, several seasons running, and led the American League in stolen bases in 1938, despite never being much of a burner. He found ways to be useful that didn't show up as home runs.

Four Straight, Then a War

Crosetti started at shortstop for three more championships after 1936 -- 1937, 1938, and 1939, the heart of the DiMaggio-era dynasty's four-peat. The 1937 infield of Gehrig, Lazzeri, Crosetti, and Rolfe played all five World Series games against the Giants, including the one they lost, without committing a single error. In the 1938 sweep of the Cubs, Crosetti's two-run homer off Dizzy Dean in the eighth inning of Game 2 broke the game open, and DiMaggio added another in the ninth to finish it, 6-3. In 1939, with Gehrig gone from the lineup and the country still absorbing his farewell speech, Crosetti scored the run that clinched the sweep of Cincinnati, coming home in the tenth inning of the finale.

He was on the roster again in 1941 when the Yankees beat Brooklyn, though by then Phil Rizzuto had taken the shortstop job and Crosetti watched the Series from the bench. He played in 1942 -- three at-bats -- as the Cardinals beat the Yankees in five games, the only World Series loss of his career. Then came the war. With regulars filing off to service one by one, Crosetti split shortstop duties in 1943 with a rookie named Snuffy Stirnweiss, and the Yankees won it again. He kept ceding playing time to Stirnweiss through 1944 and 1945, and by 1947 he was barely a player at all -- three games, one hitless at-bat, already running the bullpen for new manager Bucky Harris while the Yankees beat Brooklyn once more. He played his final season in 1948 and retired that winter, seventeen years and eight championships after he'd arrived.

Twenty More Years, Nine More Rings

Crosetti didn't leave the organization. In 1949, Casey Stengel made him the Yankees' third base coach, and he stayed there through the rest of Stengel's tenure, then Ralph Houk's, then Yogi Berra's, then Johnny Keane's, then Houk's again -- twenty consecutive years in the same job, coaching a lineup that turned over from Rizzuto and DiMaggio to Mantle and Maris to Mel Stottlemyre and a young Yankees roster that was starting to lose. Along the way, the Yankees won nine more championships with Crosetti on the third-base line -- five straight from 1949 through 1953, then 1956, 1958, 1961, and 1962. By the end of it, as the story goes, the Yankees had run out of things to give him for winning it all again and started handing him an engraved shotgun instead of another ring.

He earned a reputation as an old-school taskmaster who didn't care much for players who treated the game like a joke -- he was known to grumble about a teammate playing harmonica in the clubhouse in the middle of a losing streak, and he was famous for arriving first and leaving last, coach or not (the kind of habit that outlasts five different managers for a reason). He also had a gift for teaching. Phil Rizzuto credited him with showing how to read a pitcher's stance to pick up signs. He taught Ryne Duren to throw one over a hitter's head just to remind him the strike zone wasn't guaranteed. And on October 8, 1956, before Game 5 of the World Series against Brooklyn, Crosetti used his own private signal to let a pitcher know he was starting that day -- a warm-up ball, tucked into the toe of a spike. Don Larsen found it in his shoe that morning. He threw the only perfect game in World Series history that afternoon.

After the Bronx

Retiring from the Yankees didn't mean retiring from baseball. Crosetti coached the expansion Seattle Pilots in 1969 -- a last-place team in its only season in Seattle -- then joined Bill Rigney's staff with the Minnesota Twins, helping them win the AL West in 1970. He coached one more season after that, then stepped away from the game for good after 1971, decades after most of his contemporaries had already gone home.

He spent his retirement in Northern California and died February 11, 2002, in Stockton, at 91, from complications after breaking his hip in a fall that January. He was never elected to the Hall of Fame, and he never seemed to expect it to be. What he left instead was a number nobody has matched: 17 championships, spread across 37 years, in a uniform that fit him the entire time.

Nobody hands out a plaque for staying that long. Crosetti got a shotgun instead, and then another, and by the time he finally left the Bronx in 1968, on a birthday, with a letter he wrote himself, he'd already won more of them than anyone else ever would.