Marv Throneberry

September 25, 1955. Fenway Park. Marv Throneberry trots out as a pinch runner for Eddie Robinson, stays in the game at first base, and drives in a run with a sacrifice fly in his very first big-league plate appearance. A few innings later he rips a bases-loaded double. Final line for the day: 2-for-2, a run scored, three RBI -- while his own brother, Boston outfielder Faye Throneberry, strikes out three times in the very same game (a rough afternoon for the family). It's a hell of a debut. The Yankees don't call him back up again for the rest of that season, or the next one, or the one after that.

That's the Marv Throneberry story in miniature, years before anyone in New York called him "Marvelous." He spent parts of three seasons in pinstripes -- 1955, 1958, and 1959 -- blocked at first base by Bill Skowron, mashing home runs in Denver that nobody in the Bronx seemed to need. The fame came later, and it came somewhere else. This is the part of his story that happened here.

The Bonus Baby Who Couldn't Get In

The Yankees signed Throneberry in 1952 for a reported $50,000 bonus, a serious sum for an 18-year-old out of Collierville, Tennessee. He earned it. Sent to the Triple-A Denver Bears, he led the American Association in home runs three years running -- 36 in 1955, 42 in 1956, 40 in 1957 -- and took home the league MVP award in '56, when he slashed .315/.386/.611 with 145 RBI. Those are numbers that get a player summoned to the big leagues in a hurry (in most organizations, anyway).

Throneberry got his cup of coffee that September, then went right back to Denver. The problem wasn't his bat. The problem was that the Yankees already had a first baseman, and he was good.

Skowron had taken over the job in 1954 and wasn't giving it up -- not with a .340 rookie season and a lineup that already ran through Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra. A Triple-A home run title doesn't mean much when the incumbent is hitting his way toward four championships. Throneberry got a real look in 1958, when Skowron went down with an injury in May and Throneberry filled in -- 60 games, 150 at-bats, .227, 7 home runs, 19 RBI. Respectable pop, forgettable average, part-time work.

The Yankees Yearbook Knew It, Too

By 1959, even the club's own publicity department was hedging on him. The Yankees Yearbook noted that he'd "showed flashes of that great [minor league home run] power with the Yanks last year, but a strikeout tendency limited his first base and outfield duty." Stengel liked what he saw that spring -- he praised Throneberry for "hitting hard and fielding with class in right field" -- but liking a bench player's swing in March isn't the same as handing him a lineup spot in April.

Throneberry started only 44 games in 1959, splitting time between first base and the outfield, and finished at .240 with 8 home runs and 22 RBI in 192 at-bats. Respectable again. Still not enough to crack a roster that had Skowron entrenched and a front office that valued a settled defense over a slugger's ceiling.

Stengel wasn't just handing out a nice quote for a guy he'd never see again. He meant it -- Throneberry needed everyday at-bats to do what he'd done in Denver, and the Yankees simply didn't have them to give.

One Game, One Ring

Throneberry's lone October appearance in pinstripes came in Game 2 of the 1958 World Series at Milwaukee's County Stadium, on October 2. He pinch-hit for Murry Dickson in the eighth inning and struck out against Lew Burdette -- who'd already gone deep himself that day -- in a 13-5 blowout loss that put the Yankees in an 0-2 series hole. The Yankees won the next four straight anyway, capping the comeback in Game 7, and Throneberry got a championship ring for one strikeout's worth of work. It's a strange way to become a World Series champion. It's also exactly what happened.

Out the Door, Into History

By December 1959, the math hadn't changed. Skowron was still the first baseman, and the Yankees needed outfield help more than they needed a second slugger stuck behind him. On December 11, 1959, the Yankees sent Throneberry, Don Larsen, Hank Bauer, and Norm Siebern to the Kansas City Athletics for Roger Maris, Joe DeMaestri, and Kent Hadley.

Every retelling of that trade is really about Maris -- the MVP awards, the 61 home runs, the record. Throneberry is a name in the fine print, the fourth player going the other way. That's a fair reflection of what his three years in the Bronx actually were: a talented hitter who never got the volume of at-bats to prove what Denver already knew about him.

He bounced from Kansas City to Baltimore over the next two-plus seasons, a fringe big-leaguer without a regular job, which is exactly what his Yankees tenure had trained him to be. Then in May 1962 the expansion Mets claimed him, handed him an everyday role for the first time in his career, and something unexpected happened: he became famous. Not for the power -- though he hit 16 home runs that year, his career high, and led that team in homers -- but for a run of baserunning and fielding blunders so vivid that when Stengel, managing the Mets by then too, came out to argue a call that ruled Throneberry out for missing first base, the umpire just waved him off: "Don't bother, Casey, he missed second base too." New York writers started calling him "Marvelous Marv." The nickname followed him the rest of his life, all the way to a series of Miller Lite commercials (a stranger kind of fame than three home run titles in Denver ever bought him). None of it happened in pinstripes.

Throneberry died of cancer on June 23, 1994, at his home in Fisherville, Tennessee, at 60. He's remembered everywhere as the face of the worst team baseball had produced in decades. In the Bronx, the truer memory is smaller and less funny: a bonus baby who hit the cover off the ball in Denver, got exactly 347 at-bats across three big-league seasons to prove it belonged, and left with a ring he barely played for.