Johnny Lindell

The Yankees signed him as a pitcher in 1936. They played him as an outfielder for most of the 1940s. Then, on his way out of the game, he became a pitcher again -- good enough at it to win a minor-league MVP award at age 35. Johnny Lindell didn't have one baseball career. He had three, stacked on top of each other (the middle one is the only stretch most people remember), and that middle act happened to include a World Series double that helped set up the most famous near-no-hitter in postseason history.

Lindell played for the New York Yankees from 1941 to 1950, a stretch of three championships and one stubborn refusal to be just one kind of ballplayer. He stood 6-foot-4, a genuine giant for his era, and he used that size on the mound, in the outfield, and once, memorably, running through a third baseman. Over 752 games in pinstripes he hit .275 with 64 home runs -- solid, unspectacular numbers that undersell how much the Yankees leaned on him at three different positions.

A Pitcher Who Couldn't Get Anybody Out (Yet)

Bill Essick, the same West Coast scout who'd found Joe DiMaggio, signed Lindell out of a pitching career at USC in 1936 for a $150 bonus (the going rate for a raw arm nobody outside California had heard of yet). By 1940 he'd gone 18-7 with a 2.70 ERA at Double-A Kansas City, and in 1941, after a single pinch-hitting appearance on the big-league roster, the Yankees sent him to the Newark Bears, where he went 23-4 on the mound and hit .298 on the side. The Sporting News named him Minor League Player of the Year. Nobody in the organization was quite sure whether he was a pitcher who could hit or a hitter who could pitch.

Manager Joe McCarthy made the call in 1942. Lindell pitched in 23 games out of the Yankees' bullpen that year, going 2-1 with a 3.58 ERA over 55 1/3 innings -- respectable work, but McCarthy read the low strikeout totals as a warning sign. So McCarthy moved him to the outfield in 1943, and Lindell -- with no real complaint on record -- went and won the starting right field job.

The timing mattered. DiMaggio had left for the Army Air Forces, and the 1943 Yankees needed outfielders who wouldn't embarrass the pinstripes while he was gone. Lindell started 64 games in right, 52 in center, and four in left, hit .245, and led the American League with 12 triples -- respectable enough to make the All-Star team as a reserve. The wartime roster held, the Yankees won the pennant by 13.5 games, and Lindell picked up his first championship ring when New York beat the Cardinals in five games.

He didn't just watch that World Series happen around him. In Game 3, down 2-1 in the eighth inning, Lindell led off with a single and took second on an error. When Snuffy Stirnweiss bunted, the Cardinals tried to nail Lindell at third -- and Lindell, all 220 pounds of him, ran through third baseman Whitey Kurowski hard enough to jar the ball loose. The Yankees scored five runs that inning, won the game 6-2, and closed out the Series two days later. Nobody remembered Lindell's batting line from that World Series. Everybody remembered the collision.

The Best Year Nobody Talks About

If you want the real argument for Lindell as a player -- not a role guy, not a converted pitcher filling a wartime hole, but a genuine offensive threat -- it's 1944. He hit .300 with 18 home runs, 103 RBI, and a league-leading 16 triples, his second straight triples title. He led the American League in total bases and finished third in home runs, RBI, and slugging percentage. It was, by any measure that counts hits and runs, the best season of his career. He was 27 years old and looked like he'd found his level for good.

He lost part of the next year to the war. Drafted into the Army in June 1945, Lindell spent roughly nine months in uniform before his discharge the following March -- a shorter interruption than teammates like DiMaggio or Charlie Keller endured, but a real one all the same. He came back for the 1946 season and settled into what he'd be for the rest of his Yankees tenure: a good, physical, reliably above-average outfielder on a team that had bigger stars to talk about.

One October, Two Plays

1947 gave Lindell his signature month. In Game 4 of the World Series at Ebbets Field, Bill Bevens carried a no-hitter into the ninth inning against Brooklyn. Lindell had already done his part to make it possible -- an RBI double in the fourth inning had scored Billy Johnson for a 2-0 Yankees lead, the only runs Bevens would need if the no-hitter held. Then, with two outs to go, Lindell went back to the left-field bleacher wall and leaped to rob Bruce Edwards leading off the ninth, keeping the no-hit bid alive for two more outs. It wasn't enough. Cookie Lavagetto's pinch double two batters later broke up the no-hitter and won the game for Brooklyn, 3-2. Lindell had done everything a hitter and a left fielder could do to protect that lead. Baseball didn't care.

The Series went on, and Lindell kept hitting. He finished at .500 -- 9-for-18 with seven RBI and five walks, tying Pepper Martin's record for the highest average in a seven-game World Series -- despite missing Game 7 entirely. He'd fractured a rib and bruised his knee crashing into a fielder to break up a double play in Game 6, the same kind of collision that had defined his October four years earlier. The Yankees won it in seven games anyway, powered by DiMaggio's MVP season and a roster deep enough to survive without its hottest bat for the finale. Second championship ring, earned the hard way.

Lindell picked up a third ring in 1949, Casey Stengel's first title as Yankees manager, appearing in two games as a reserve outfielder off a bench that barely needed him. By then he was 33, no longer an everyday player, and the Yankees had outfielders to spare. On May 15, 1950, they sold him to St. Louis in-season. He hit .188 in 36 games down the stretch. The Yankees years were over.

The Second Act Nobody Saw Coming

Most players fade quietly once a big-league team decides it's done with them. Lindell went to the Pacific Coast League and reinvented himself -- again. Working on a knuckleball he'd started tinkering with on the side late in his final Yankees season, he pitched for the Hollywood Stars, and by 1952 he wasn't just competent, he was the best pitcher in the league: 24-9, 2.52 ERA, PCL MVP at 35 years old (an age when most players are already coaching third base somewhere).

Pittsburgh bought his contract off that season and brought him back to the majors in 1953. It didn't go the way the comeback story wanted it to -- pitching for the Pirates and then the Phillies after an August sale, Lindell led the National League in walks and wild pitches and finished 6-17. He made seven pinch-hitting appearances for Philadelphia in 1954, all outs, and was released that May. The knuckleball that carried him to a PCL MVP award couldn't find home plate consistently enough for the National League.

Lindell died of lung cancer in a Southern California hospital on August 27, 1985, three days short of his 69th birthday. He'd spent much of the 1960s running the speakers' bureau for the expansion Los Angeles Angels, a quiet front-office life a long way from Ebbets Field. Three World Series rings, one legitimate MVP-caliber season at the plate, and a pitching line that started in 1942 and somehow, improbably, didn't finish until 1954. Not many players get to leave the game the same way they entered it. Lindell did, on his own terms, twelve years apart.