Whitey Witt

September 16, 1922. Sportsman's Park, St. Louis, bottom of the ninth. The Yankees clung to a 2-1 lead over the Browns in the opener of a series that would decide the American League pennant. Whitey Witt drifted toward center field, chasing a fly ball alongside Bob Meusel, when a pop bottle came out of the crowd and caught him square in the forehead. He went down like he'd been shot. The Yankees won that game anyway, won the pennant a share of a week later, and Witt -- the club's scrappy, light-hitting leadoff man -- became the answer to one of the era's strangest trivia questions: who got knocked unconscious in the middle of a pennant race and came back to help win it?

A Long Way From Orange, Massachusetts

He was born Ladislaw Waldemar Wittkowski on September 28, 1895, in Orange, Massachusetts, and by the time Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics gave him his debut on April 12, 1916, he wasn't Wittkowski anymore. As the story goes, Mack didn't feel like writing "Wittkowski" on a lineup card every single day, so he shortened it to Witt (the lineup card, not the man, was apparently the real problem). Blond hair took care of the rest. "Whitey" stuck for good.

He was a small man for the era of small men -- 5'7", 150 pounds -- and he made his living the way small men who can't hit for power always have: getting on base, running, and covering ground in center field. He played for the A's in 1916 and 1917, missed 1918 entirely, and came back for three more seasons in Philadelphia before Mack, rebuilding a roster that had bottomed out, sold him. The Yankees bought Witt for $7,500 on April 17, 1922, days before Opening Day. They needed a leadoff man. They got one who'd end up as more than that.

Leading Off for a Dynasty in the Making

Witt hit .297 in his first year in pinstripes, drew enough walks to lead the American League in them, and settled in as the table-setter in front of Babe Ruth, Meusel, and Wally Pipp. That mattered more than usual in 1922, because Ruth spent the first six weeks of the season suspended for barnstorming the previous fall, and the Yankees needed everybody else to hold the line until he got back. Witt held it.

The pennant race that followed came down to the Yankees and Browns, and it came down to a single game -- New York finished 94-60, St. Louis 93-61. Witt's bottle-to-the-forehead moment landed right in the middle of the decisive series at Sportsman's Park, and it wasn't just some incidental injury. It was the specific image the whole pennant race got remembered by. He went down cold in front of a packed, hostile crowd that badly wanted its own team to win. He got up, and so did the Yankees.

October brought a third straight World Series against John McGraw's Giants, and a third straight loss -- the Yankees were swept 4-0-1, their last Series played as tenants at the Polo Grounds. Witt hit .200 in that Series. It wasn't the kind of October that gets remembered fondly. The next one would be.

The First Batter at the Stadium

April 18, 1923. A new ballpark rose across the Harlem River, built because the Giants had grown tired of the Yankees outdrawing them in a building that wasn't even the Yankees' own. An estimated 74,200 fans packed in for the opener against Boston, and when the umpire called play, it was Witt -- not Ruth, not Meusel -- who stepped in first. He grounded out, Fewster to Burns. Ruth homered later that afternoon and the papers ran with "The House That Ruth Built" before the ink dried. But Witt got there first, a footnote that outlived most of what actually happened that day. He came back to Yankee Stadium fourteen more times for Old-Timers' Day, introduced every time as the answer to the trivia question he'd created by accident.

The 1923 season was Witt's best in pinstripes -- a .314 average, a .386 on-base percentage, and a Yankees club that finally separated itself from the Giants after two straight October failures. New York won 98 games and the pennant by 16 games over Detroit. Ruth won his only MVP award. And for the third October in a row, the Yankees and Giants met to decide the city's baseball hierarchy.

This time New York won it, four games to two, for the first championship in franchise history. Witt hit 6-for-25 -- a .240 average that undersells what he did, since two of those hits were doubles and he drove in four runs setting the table in front of Ruth's .368 series. He wasn't the story of October 1923. Ruth's three home runs and eight walks took care of that. But the leadoff man who'd been unconscious on the grass in St. Louis thirteen months earlier scored a run in the deciding game of the World Series his team had chased for three straight years.

The Fade and the Long Life After

Witt played two more seasons in the Bronx. He hit .297 again in 1924, his last full year as an everyday player, and stole a career-high nine bases for a Yankees club that finished second to Washington. By 1925 -- a season that fell apart for the whole organization, with Ruth sidelined by illness and eventually suspended by Miller Huggins -- Witt had slipped to a part-time role and hit just .200 in 31 games. The Yankees released him after the season. Brooklyn signed him that December, and he played one more big-league year there before finishing out his career in the high minors -- three seasons split between the Mission Reds, the Kansas City Blues, and the Reading Keystones -- and walking away from the game for good after 1929.

He bought a 160-year-old farmhouse in Alloway Township, New Jersey, back in 1921, and he kept it the rest of his life, restoring it slowly as the surrounding land filled in with harness-racing farms (a quiet retirement for a man whose two most famous moments each lasted about four seconds). He outlived every one of his 1923 teammates. Ruth died in 1948. Gehrig was gone even earlier. By the time Witt died on July 14, 1988, at 92, he was the last man alive who could say he'd played on the team that started it all.

He's not in the Hall of Fame, and nobody seriously argues he belongs there -- a .287 career hitter with 18 home runs over ten seasons doesn't make that case, and nobody, including Witt, ever tried to make it. What he has instead is a stranger kind of immortality: the answer to two trivia questions that have nothing to do with each other except that they both happened to him. He was the man who got hit by the bottle. He was the man who batted first in the new Stadium. Sixty-five years after he'd done both, he was still the only man left who remembered doing either.