George Selkirk

August 12, 1934. Fenway Park, a doubleheader billed as Babe Ruth's last game there as a Yankee. More than 46,000 fans packed the place, with another 20,000 turned away at the gates. Ruth started in left field. In right field, wearing a Yankees uniform for the first time in his life, stood a 26-year-old rookie named George Selkirk. When Ruth left the second game to a standing ovation, Selkirk found himself doing something he hadn't planned on. "The crowd was clapping and cheering for the Babe," he remembered. "I just stood there and then I realized that I had taken off my cap and I was clapping my hands, just like those people in the stands. It was something that came from the heart."

Within a year, Selkirk wasn't just sharing an outfield with Ruth's memory. He was replacing him in it. From 1935 through 1942, Selkirk played right field for the New York Yankees, wearing Ruth's own No. 3, and did something close to the impossible: he made the job his own. He batted .291 with 108 home runs and 576 RBI over nine seasons, made two All-Star teams, and played on five World Series champions, more championship games than any Canadian-born player before or since. Nobody would ever mistake him for Ruth. That was never the point. The point was that a kid from Huntsville, Ontario, took the toughest assignment in baseball and didn't flinch.

Seven Years to Get Here

Selkirk's path to the Bronx wasn't quick. Rochester signed him out of school in 1927 and used him for four games before shipping him off to the Cambridge Canners of the Eastern Shore League. From there it was four seasons with the Jersey City Skeeters of the International League, a stop in Toronto, another in Newark, another in Columbus, then back to Rochester again. Seven minor league seasons in all, a decade of bus rides and hotel rooms before he ever saw a big-league box score with his name in it. Somewhere in Jersey City, teammates picked up on the way he ran, up on his toes to fight off recurring charley horses, and started calling him "Twinkletoes." It stuck for the rest of his life, whether he liked it or not.

Yankees general manager Ed Barrow had an easy scouting trip watching Selkirk in Jersey City, close enough to the Bronx that a scout barely needed a train ticket. Barrow liked what he saw enough to bring him up for a look in August 1934, the same stretch of season Ruth was finishing out his own Yankees career. Selkirk hit .313 in 46 games. Ruth signed with the Boston Braves that winter and never played for the Yankees again.

Taking the Number, Taking the Heat

That left an opening, and someone had to fill it. Selkirk wanted the job badly enough to want the number that went with it. "If I am going to take his place," he told the Brooklyn Eagle in 1936, "I'll take his number, too." It was a bold thing to say out loud in 1935. It was a rough thing to live with. Yankee Stadium crowds booed him that first year, and Selkirk never pretended otherwise. "I got his job," he said years later, "and it took a long time for people to forgive me."

What quieted the boos was the baseball. Selkirk hit .307 with a career-high 107 RBI in 1936, then .332 in 1937, the best batting average of his career. He batted over .300 in five separate seasons and drove in more than 100 runs twice, in 1936 and again in 1939, the year he made his second All-Star team. He played alongside Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Tony Lazzeri, and Lefty Gomez in his early seasons, then Joe DiMaggio, Red Rolfe, and Joe Gordon as the roster turned over around him. By the time Tommy Henrich and Charlie Keller arrived to round out the outfield picture, Selkirk was the elder statesman of a Yankees team that simply didn't lose in October.

Joe McCarthy won four straight World Series with Selkirk in right field, from 1936 through 1939, and Selkirk made sure the ledger balanced. In Game 1 of the 1936 World Series against the Giants, his first-ever Fall Classic at-bat, he drove a pitch out of the park at the Polo Grounds, one of only a handful of players in the sport's history to homer in a first World Series at-bat. He finished that Series 8-for-24. He picked up a fifth ring in 1941, then played out his final big-league at-bat as a pinch-hitter in Game 5 of the 1942 World Series, a loss to the Cardinals that ended his playing days on the wrong side of the ledger for the only time in his career.

A Second Career, Longer Than the First

Six weeks after that final at-bat, Selkirk enlisted in the Navy, training recruits as an aerial gunnery instructor through the end of World War II. He came home in 1946 with nothing left to prove as a hitter and no illusions about it. Rather than force his way back onto the Yankees roster, he became player-manager of the Newark Bears, played 31 games at age 38, then quietly retired as a player for good.

What came next lasted twice as long as his playing career. Selkirk managed in the Yankees system for six years, at Newark, then Binghamton, then Kansas City, developing a run of future Yankees that reads like a highlight reel: Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Bob Cerv, Joe Page, Bill Skowron all played for him on their way up. He moved into player personnel work for the Kansas City Athletics and the Baltimore Orioles, then in 1962 became general manager of the expansion Washington Senators, the first Canadian-born general manager in major league history. Money was always tight in Washington, and the Senators never built much of a farm system on his watch, but the team improved every single year from 1963 through 1967 anyway. He finished his baseball life back where it started, scouting for the Yankees.