George McQuinn

January 9, 1947. Connie Mack released George McQuinn outright, telling anyone who'd listen that the 36-year-old first baseman had played one year too long. McQuinn had just hit .225 for a last-place Philadelphia Athletics team, the worst season of his career, capped by a doubleheader so bad -- four strikeouts, three popups -- that he told his wife Kathleen he was done. She talked him out of it. Sixteen days later, the New York Yankees signed him anyway.

By October, McQuinn was starting at first base in Game 7 of the World Series, a champion at last after eight years of near-misses with the St. Louis Browns. Baseball has a way of making fools out of the people who write a player off. Mack wasn't wrong that McQuinn was near the end. He was wrong about how much McQuinn had left.

Blocked by Gehrig, Built by the Browns

McQuinn's path to a Yankees uniform ran through the Yankees themselves, decades earlier. Born May 29, 1910, in Arlington, Virginia, he turned down a spot at William & Mary to sign with the Yankees organization out of the D.C. sandlots. It didn't matter how well he hit in the low minors -- Lou Gehrig owned first base in the Bronx, and nobody was displacing the Iron Horse. A brief, unsuccessful trial with Cincinnati in 1936 came and went. McQuinn landed back in the Yankees system and hit .330 with 21 home runs for the 1937 Newark Bears, a club that finished 109-43 and is still argued over as the greatest minor-league team ever assembled (there's a whole book about that one team, which tells you something). It didn't get him to New York. The Yankees left him unprotected, and the St. Louis Browns grabbed him with the first pick of that winter's Rule 5 draft.

The Browns made McQuinn their regular first baseman for the next eight seasons, and he made himself into one of the better defenders in the league at the position -- compared at the time to Joe Kuhel, Hal Chase, and Hall of Famer George Sisler. In 1944, he had his signature moment in a Browns uniform: the only pennant that dreadful franchise ever won, and a World Series against the crosstown Cardinals in which McQuinn out-hit everybody on either roster. He batted .438, and his fourth-inning homer in Game 1 -- the only home run the Browns hit in that entire Series -- briefly put St. Louis ahead. The Cardinals still won in six. It was as close as McQuinn would get to a ring for another three years.

That October ended up being the high point of his time in St. Louis. The Browns traded him to the Athletics for Dick Siebert on October 16, 1945 (Siebert never actually reported -- he retired rather than play for the Browns -- and Commissioner Happy Chandler let Philadelphia keep McQuinn anyway). One flat season with a bad Athletics team later, Mack cut him loose. McQuinn was 36 years old, coming off his worst year in the majors, and by his own account ready to hang it up.

A Reclamation Project That Won a Ring

New Yankees manager Bucky Harris had always liked McQuinn's glove. GM Larry MacPhail needed a first baseman -- Nick Etten had faded badly in 1946 -- and on January 25, 1947, the Yankees signed McQuinn as a free agent. Some of the New York papers weren't impressed. One tagged him "the man nobody wanted," which wasn't far from the truth: a first baseman his own former manager had just declared washed up, walking into a pennant race at 36.

He got his opening almost by accident. Charlie Keller strained a muscle early in spring training, which pushed Tommy Henrich off first base and into the outfield -- and left the job open for McQuinn. He started hitting immediately, even against left-handers, and Harris never had a reason to look elsewhere. McQuinn played 144 games at first, hit .304 with 13 home runs and 80 RBI, and turned in the best all-around season of his career at an age when most players are already coaching. He made the AL All-Star team and finished sixth in MVP voting, with three first-place votes -- the highest finish of his life.

The 1947 Yankees won 97 games and the pennant by 12 over Detroit, riding a stretch that included a 19-game winning streak in June and July. Joe DiMaggio won his third MVP award that season, and McQuinn's bat and glove at first base were a real reason the lineup could carry that kind of weight from top to bottom.

The World Series itself was a rougher ride. McQuinn started all seven games against the Dodgers, including the Bevens near-no-hitter in Game 4 and the Gionfriddo catch in Game 6, both instant Series lore. His own bat went cold at the worst time -- he hit just .130 in the Series -- but the Yankees won it in seven anyway, and McQuinn had his championship. Mack had been half right. McQuinn wasn't the player he'd been in 1939. He was still good enough.

One More Season, Then Home

McQuinn came back in 1948 and started fast, hitting .340 as of May 31 and earning a second straight All-Star nod as the AL's starting first baseman. The long season wore him down. He finished at .248 with 11 home runs and 41 RBI in 94 games, splitting time as the Yankees won 94 games (a total that would've been good enough for first place almost any other year) and still finished third behind Cleveland and Boston, a race so tight it took a one-game playoff between the other two teams just to settle it. It was his last major-league season. He was 38.

He didn't get traded or released out of New York -- he simply walked away, the same decision Kathleen had talked him out of two years earlier, made this time on his own terms and after a title. McQuinn managed in the Boston Braves' farm system through the 1950s, later scouted for the Washington Senators and the expansion Montreal Expos, and in between ran a sporting-goods store called McQuinn's back home in Clarendon, Virginia, until the neighborhood's decline forced him to close it. He died of a stroke on December 24, 1978, in Alexandria, Virginia, at 68.

Key Moments

McQuinn never got the chance to be a Yankee in his twenties, when Gehrig had the job locked down and there was nowhere for him to go. He got it in his late thirties instead, on a one-year-too-long contract from a manager who'd already given up on him. It worked out better than anyone but McQuinn -- and maybe Kathleen -- had any right to expect.