Ron Blomberg

Ron Blomberg was the New York Yankees' first baseman and designated hitter from 1969 through 1976, a No. 1 overall draft pick out of Atlanta who hit .302 in pinstripes and became one of the most enduring trivia answers in baseball history. On April 6, 1973, he became the first designated hitter to bat in a major league game -- a moment already told in full right here on this site. This is the rest of his story: the can't-miss prospect who turned down John Wooden and Bear Bryant, hit .302 in pinstripes, and never got enough healthy at-bats to prove exactly how good he was.

Path to the Bronx

Blomberg grew up in Atlanta and became something no other American athlete has managed before or since -- a Parade All-American in three separate sports. Baseball, football, basketball, all at Druid Hills High School (he also lettered in track, because apparently three wasn't enough). John Wooden drove down personally to recruit him for UCLA basketball. Bear Bryant wanted him at Alabama. Blomberg picked baseball, and the Yankees picked him first.

On June 6, 1967, the Yankees held the No. 1 overall pick in the amateur draft -- a spot they only occupied because the 1966 club had been bad enough to earn it, a genuinely strange sentence to write about a franchise with more championships than any other. They used it on Blomberg. Reports on the signing bonus range from $65,000 to $90,000 depending on who's telling the story (baseball bonuses from 1967 apparently came with less paperwork than they do now), but the number that mattered was 1: first player picked, nationally, that June.

He worked his way up through the system -- Johnson City in the Appalachian League at seventeen, a brief and unsuccessful experiment in center field at Kinston (a position he'd never played, because the Bronx already had a first baseman), then .284 with 19 home runs at Double-A Manchester in 1969. That earned him a September call-up. He debuted on September 10, pinch-hitting for pitcher Bill Burbach at RFK Stadium and drawing a walk. Four games, 3-for-6. Then the Yankees sent him back to the minors for all of 1970. Sometimes the path to stardom includes a full extra year nobody remembers.

Yankees Career

Blomberg made the roster for good in 1971 and hit .322 in 64 games. Ralph Houk moved him to first base full-time in 1972, and Blomberg answered with a career-high 14 home runs. Then came 1973 -- his best year by a wide margin, and the year the American League handed him a new job title.

The numbers hold up. A .302 hitter with an OPS north of .850 would start for most Yankees teams in most decades. The problem was never the bat -- it was getting Blomberg on the field. He topped 100 games in a season exactly once. Injuries -- knees, hamstrings, shoulders, the whole list -- turned a potential everyday star into a part-time one, and the DH rule that made him famous was, in a real sense, the league finally building a job around a body that couldn't do much else.

Blomberg later summed up the injury math himself -- four knee surgeries, two shoulder operations, a career interrupted more than it was ever allowed to run. When journalist Dick Schaap asked him years afterward what it felt like to be the first DH, Blomberg didn't hesitate.

Schaap told him that line was a book title. It became one -- Blomberg's 2012 memoir carries that exact name.

Key Moments

Legacy

Blomberg's bat from that April afternoon at Fenway sits in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Blomberg himself does not, and he's made peace with that math -- a .302 hitter with 401 Yankees games simply never compiled the counting numbers a Hall case requires. What he compiled instead was a permanent answer to a trivia question that will outlive every player who shared that field with him, including Thurman Munson, Graig Nettles, and Bobby Murcer, all teammates during those 1973 lean years.

The National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame inducted him in 2004, and he's stayed a fixture at Jewish community and baseball events ever since -- the guy who grew up facing anti-Semitism in Atlanta and found, in his own telling, a much bigger and more welcoming Jewish community waiting for him in New York. The nickname stuck for a reason. Nobody who watched him hit ever doubted the talent. The rulebook just eventually built a job that fit the body he actually had.

Blomberg's bat is in Cooperstown. Blomberg never will be. He's fine with the arrangement -- as he put it himself, he made the Hall of Fame through the back door, and he's still there.