Snuffy Stirnweiss

On the final day of the 1945 season, Snuffy Stirnweiss trailed Tony Cuccinello in the race for the American League batting title by less than a point. He went 3-for-5 against Boston. Cuccinello's White Sox got rained out and never played again that year. When the averages settled, Stirnweiss had won the closest batting race in American League history -- .308544 to Cuccinello's .308457, a margin of nine hundred-thousandths, rounded in the record books to .309 and .308. It's the lowest average to win an AL batting crown outright since Elmer Flick's .308 in 1905 -- a distinction that held until Carl Yastrzemski won the 1968 AL title at an even lower .301.

That's the whole career distilled into one afternoon. George "Snuffy" Stirnweiss played second base for the New York Yankees from 1943 to 1950, won a batting title (a short list of Yankees have ever done it, and his name sits on it right between DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle), led the league in stolen bases twice, and helped the Yankees to three World Series championships. He also became, almost immediately, the answer to a trivia question nobody thinks to ask: which Yankee won a batting crown and still can't get a table at the reunion dinner?

The Halfback Who Failed His Physical

Stirnweiss grew up in New York, went to Fordham Prep, and then became a football star at the University of North Carolina -- a second-team All-American halfback whose Tar Heels went 21-4-3 across his three varsity seasons. The Chicago Cardinals took him in the second round of the 1940 NFL Draft. He turned them down and signed with the Yankees instead, a decision that looked questionable for exactly three years.

He hit well enough in the minors -- a .307 average with the Norfolk Tars in his first pro season -- but the Yankees had no obvious spot for a stocky infielder behind Joe Gordon and Frank Crosetti. Then came 1943. Stirnweiss failed his Army physical that spring, classified 4-F for gastric ulcers, hay fever, and the fact that he was supporting his mother and sister. He never served. Instead, he made his major-league debut on April 22, 1943, sharing shortstop duties with Crosetti while the Yankees' real stars filed off to war one by one -- DiMaggio, Rizzuto, and Red Ruffing were already gone that season, and Gordon followed after it.

1944: Everything but the Average

By 1944, with Gordon in the Army, the second base job was Stirnweiss's alone, and he ran with it -- literally. He led the American League in hits (205), runs (125), triples (16), and stolen bases (55), a total that would've looked at home in the dead-ball era. His .319 average was only good for fourth place in that year's batting race, and he finished fourth in MVP voting too, behind Hal Newhouser, Dizzy Trout, and Bobby Doerr. Fourth place, on a team that finished third. Nobody was pretending the Yankees were still the Yankees.

1945: The Race Nobody Saw Coming

The next year, Stirnweiss and first baseman Nick Etten carried nearly the whole offense, and the 1945 club leaned on both of them to lead the league in runs scored. Stirnweiss played all 152 games, led the AL in hits (195), runs (107), triples (22), and stolen bases (33) again, and edged Cuccinello for the batting crown on the last afternoon of the season. He still finished only third in MVP voting -- Newhouser again, then Detroit's Eddie Mayo, then Stirnweiss. A batting champion, and somehow still the third-best player in his own league that year.

The Wartime Asterisk

Here's the honest accounting. Stirnweiss won that title against pitching staffs stocked with 4-Fs, teenagers, and men well past their prime, because everyone good enough to stop him was in uniform somewhere else. A .309 average wouldn't have sniffed a batting crown in most full-strength seasons before or after it (Ted Williams was hitting .400 a few years earlier against the real thing). It's fair to call it diluted. It's also fair to point out that Stirnweiss didn't choose the competition -- he just faced whoever the league put in front of him, game after game, for three straight seasons, and beat every hitter who did the same. The title counts. It just comes with a footnote, and Stirnweiss knew it better than anyone.

When the Real Players Came Home

The proof arrived fast. In 1946, with DiMaggio and Gordon back in the lineup, Stirnweiss's average dropped 58 points to .251 and never climbed back. He kept his glove sharp, though -- in 1948 he set major-league fielding records for a second baseman, a .993 fielding percentage with just five errors all season. On Opening Day 1949, a rookie named Jerry Coleman took his job after Stirnweiss got spiked in the hand, and the job never came back (Stirnweiss had spent that spring training teaching Coleman the position, which is either a nice story or a cruel joke depending on how you look at it). That's baseball. On June 15, 1950, the Yankees sent him to the St. Louis Browns in a seven-player deal for pitchers Tom Ferrick and Joe Ostrowski. He hit .218 in 93 games and was gone from the Bronx for good.

Three Rings, Mostly From a Distance

Stirnweiss collected championships in 1943, 1947, and 1949, though his fingerprints were lightest on the first and last. In the 1943 World Series he got one pinch-hit at-bat and made an out. In 1949 he appeared in a single game and never batted. But 1947 was different -- he played all seven games against Brooklyn, reached base fifteen times between hits and walks, and made the defensive play of Bill Bevens's near-no-hitter in Game 4, ranging to his left to rob Pee Wee Reese of a ground ball up the middle. For one series, at least, Stirnweiss was exactly the player his batting title said he'd been.

He never got to enjoy much distance from any of it. On September 15, 1958, at age 39, Stirnweiss boarded a Central Railroad of New Jersey commuter train that ran through a stop signal and derailed off the open Newark Bay drawbridge. Both locomotives and the first two cars sank immediately. Forty-eight people died, Stirnweiss among them, and investigators later found the train had no working dead man's switch to stop it once the crew lost control.

There isn't a clean way to end a story like that, so it's probably better not to try. Stirnweiss won a batting title nobody expected, in a league that briefly needed him more than it needed anyone else, and then the league didn't need him anymore. He's still the answer to the trivia question. Just not the name anyone guesses first.