Gene Woodling

October 7, 1950. The Bronx, Game 4 of the World Series, ninth inning. The Yankees led the Phillies 5-0 and had already won the first three games of the Series in a row. Gene Woodling, patrolling left field, camped under a fly ball with two runners on -- and dropped it. Two runs scored. Whitey Ford's shutout was gone. The crowd groaned, Casey Stengel yanked Ford for a reliever, and Woodling stood in left field having just made the worst play of the World Series.

The Yankees won anyway, 5-2, completing a four-game sweep. Woodling finished that Series hitting .429. Nobody remembered the error by the next morning. That was Gene Woodling's whole career in miniature -- steady, unglamorous, occasionally sloppy around the edges, and attached to a winner every single time.

From Akron to the Pacific Coast

Eugene Richard Woodling was born August 16, 1922, in Akron, Ohio, where his father worked in a rubber factory. He debuted with the Cleveland Indians on September 23, 1943, batting .320 in eight late-season games, then lost two full years to the Navy. He trained at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station and played service ball alongside Bob Feller and Johnny Mize (not a bad way to spend a war, if you had to spend it somewhere).

The return to Cleveland in 1946 didn't go well. Woodling batted .188 in 150 plate appearances and spent most of the year on the bench before Cleveland traded him to Pittsburgh for catcher Al Lopez. He barely played for the Pirates either, splitting 1947 with the Newark Bears before Pittsburgh sold him to the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League that September. Something clicked on the West Coast. Woodling hit around .385 for San Francisco in 1948, and on September 30 of that year, the Yankees bought his contract for a package reported at close to $100,000 plus several players (real money for a 26-year-old outfielder nobody in the big leagues had figured out yet).

Casey Stengel had managed against Woodling in the PCL that same season, running the Oakland Oaks. When Stengel took over the Yankees for 1949, he brought Woodling with him. It turned out to be one of the better scouting reports of Stengel's career.

Half of a Platoon, All of a Winner

Woodling never had the Yankees' left field job entirely to himself. Stengel platooned him with Hank Bauer for most of the championship years, sitting Woodling against tough left-handers and running him out there against everyone else. Woodling didn't love it, and he said so decades later, but he also downplayed how often it actually happened.

The arrangement worked. From 1949 through 1954, Woodling hit .285 with a .388 on-base percentage, the kind of quiet, disciplined production that doesn't show up on a highlight reel but shows up in the standings. He rarely chased pitches out of the zone and hit line drives to all fields -- a left-handed hitter built for the short porch in right (he barely used it; most of his value came the other way).

His best year in pinstripes was 1953. Woodling hit .306 and led the American League with a .429 on-base percentage, drawing 82 walks in only 395 at-bats. It's the kind of season that gets buried underneath a lineup that also included Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle, but an AL on-base title is an AL on-base title, whoever else was hitting cleanup.

Five Rings, One Swing at a Time

The postseason is where Woodling made his real reputation. Across five World Series from 1949 to 1953, he hit .318 with three home runs in 26 games -- every one of them a Yankees championship. He hit a solo home run in three straight Fall Classics, 1951 through 1953, and delivered his best October in 1952, batting .348 against Brooklyn and homering in the fifth inning of Game 7, a 4-2 win that clinched the Yankees' fourth straight title.

That 1950 sweep of the Phillies -- dropped fly ball and all -- remains the signature memory. Woodling hit .429 in that Series, tied for the team lead, and his ninth-inning misplay in the clincher didn't cost the Yankees a thing. A year later, in the middle of the regular season, he was on the other side of a pitching gem: his seventh-inning solo homer off Bob Feller on July 12, 1951, was the only run Allie Reynolds needed to no-hit Cleveland. Woodling had a habit of showing up at the exact moment a Yankees pitcher needed one swing to make history stand up.

The Rings Weren't Enough to Keep Him

By November 1954, Woodling was 32 and coming off a down year -- a .250 average in 97 games as age and a crowded, aging roster caught up with him. George Weiss didn't get sentimental about five championship rings. He packaged Woodling with catcher Gus Triandos and four other players and sent them to Baltimore in the largest trade in major-league history, 17 players in all, to bring back Bob Turley and Don Larsen. Turley won a Cy Young Award in New York. Larsen threw a perfect game. Weiss got what he wanted.

Woodling kept playing well after the trade, just not for the Yankees. He bounced from Baltimore to Cleveland and back to Baltimore again, made his only All-Star team in 1959 as a 36-year-old Oriole hitting .300 with 14 home runs and 77 RBI, then finished out his career with Washington and the expansion Mets in 1962. Seventeen major-league seasons in all, a .284 average, 1,585 hits, and a .386 on-base percentage that ranks with anyone who ever wore pinstripes at his position. He's not in Cooperstown, and he probably never had a real case -- but for six years in the Bronx, he did his job better than almost anyone Casey Stengel ever platooned.

Woodling died on June 2, 2001, in a nursing home in Wadsworth, Ohio, more than three years after a stroke had already taken his voice. The five rings never left him, even after the words did.