Joe Collins

October 2, 1949. Yankee Stadium. The Yankees had just beaten Boston 5-3 in a win-or-go-home season finale to steal the pennant, and Joe Collins was standing in the clubhouse celebrating with a team that was about to play in the World Series. He wouldn't be on the roster for it.

Joe Collins was a left-handed-hitting first baseman who spent his entire ten-year career (1948-1957) with the New York Yankees, winning five World Series titles as a half of one of the most productive platoons in franchise history. He hit .256 with 86 home runs across 908 games, numbers that undersell what he actually did -- because what he actually did was show up in October, again and again, for a decade that produced eight American League pennants.

The Year He Watched From Outside

Collins had gotten a September call-up in 1948 -- a pinch-hit flyout off Boston's Jack Kramer in his debut, then a pinch-hit double three days later at Shibe Park for his first big-league hit. Then the Yankees sent him back down. He spent 1949 at Triple-A Kansas City, where he hit .319 with 20 home runs and made the American Association All-Star team. New York called him up again that September. He went 1-for-10, was there for the pennant clinch, and then watched the World Series from the bench -- left off the roster entirely. The championship happened without him.

It wouldn't happen without him again for a while.

The Meal Ticket

Casey Stengel built his 1950s dynasty on platoons (job security for almost nobody, rings for whoever hit the ball when the matchup called for it), and first base ran through a rotation of Johnny Mize, Johnny Hopp, and Collins before Collins took over as the regular lefty option. He became exactly what Stengel needed: a smooth-fielding first baseman who could turn on a fastball and pull it into the short right-field porch. Stengel had a name for him -- "my meal ticket."

By 1952, Collins was the everyday guy against right-handed pitching -- a career year with 18 home runs, one of them a titanic shot into the Yankee Stadium upper deck against Cleveland. He drove in a career-high 59 runs and finished sixth in the American League in slugging. That October he helped the Yanks past Brooklyn again.

Four Swings That Mattered

Collins hit four home runs across his World Series career, and three of them turned games. In the 1951 Series against the Giants, he went deep in Game 2. In Game 1 of the 1953 Series, he broke a 5-5 tie with a seventh-inning shot off Clem Labine, and the Yankees won 9-5 on their way to a fifth straight title -- a run baseball had never seen before and hasn't seen since.

The last two homers came in a Series the Yankees lost. Game 1 of the 1955 Series against Brooklyn, Collins took Don Newcombe deep twice in a 6-5 win (rookie Elston Howard went deep in that game too, in his first-ever World Series at-bat). New York still dropped that Series in seven. Collins got his ring back the next year in 1956, his fifth and last.

By then Bill Skowron had arrived to take the right-handed half of the platoon, and Collins's playing time shrank. He played his final game on September 29, 1957. That spring, the Yankees sold his contract to the Philadelphia Phillies for $20,000. Their meal ticket retired on the spot instead of reporting -- he wanted to be remembered as a Yankee, and nothing else.

He spent the next three decades as a vice president at a Newark trucking firm (about as far from a short right-field porch as a lefty pull hitter could get). Collins died on August 30, 1989, at 66, in Union Township, New Jersey. Five rings, a decade in pinstripes, and the year that almost got away in between.

Five rings is five rings. But ask Joe Collins about 1949, and the meal ticket would've told you about the one that got away first.