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Baseball's return stirs memories

April 13, 2005 1:07 am

Max Garland can hear the radio crackling now.

The cheering was so loud it sent chills down the spine of the Ferry Farms resident and longtime baseball fan.

It was 1945, and a story was unfolding that the newborn Washington Nationals might be wise to celebrate 60 years later as they attempt to connect with former Washington Senators fans and begin to add to the city's baseball history.

Casual fans gearing up for tomorrow night's home opener identify Walter Johnson and Frank Howard with Washington baseball. The Nationals can also claim Bert Shepard, Curt Flood and a Civil War baseball team as part of their heritage.

The autumn of '45, much like today, was a time of welcoming war veterans home.

And, much as they are today, people were excited about baseball in Washington.

The Washington Senators were in a pennant race with the Detroit Tigers, but that wasn't the cause for the fervor on this day.

Senators manager Ossie Bluege had brought in a relief pitcher, Bert Robert Shepard, to make his first big-league appearance.

Shepard was a military veteran--a fighter pilot whose P-39 had been shot down over Germany in 1944. When he woke up in a Nazi prison camp, he realized his right foot had been amputated by German doctors.

He had been a minor-league pitcher before the war. And he stubbornly began pitching behind the walls of the German camp as soon as a fellow prisoner fashioned him a makeshift prosthetic foot.

When he was freed, American doctors amputated part of his leg and fitted him with a proper prosthesis. Soon after that, he tried out for the Senators.

Manager Bluege clearly had no interest in a one-legged pitcher. But Senators owner Clark Griffith was moved by Shepard's story and made him a batting-practice pitcher, then a pitching coach.

The Chicago White Sox were trouncing the Senators in this game, and Bluege didn't want to use up his bullpen in a hopeless cause. So he grudgingly put Shepard into the game.

Stafford County fan Garland remembers listening to the radio as Shepard, a left-hander, came in with the bases loaded and two out. He struck out the first major-league hitter he had ever faced in a regular-season game to get out of the inning.

The Griffith Stadium crowd roared.

Shepard finished the game, pitching five spectacular innings in which he gave up only two hits and one run.

"Back in those days, pitchers had to hit," Garland, 76, recalls. "And every time he came to the plate, there was a standing ovation. It got louder and louder."

Shepard, who is now 84 and lives in Hesperia, Calif., just south of San Bernardino, never pitched in the big leagues again.

As compelling as the story is, it has gotten surprisingly scant attention over the years.

Hollywood made a 1949 feature motion picture, "The Stratton Story," starring Jimmy Stewart in a true story about Monty Stratton, a Chicago White Sox pitcher who came back to play briefly with an amputated leg after shooting himself in a hunting accident.

But Shepard's even more heroic story was largely forgotten.

"It deserves more attention," said Reed S. Browning, author of "Baseball's Greatest Season, 1924," about the year the Senators won the pennant.

Shepard could not be reached for an interview, but has repeatedly told journalists he never questioned the decision of his manager to never use him again. The team was in a pennant race and he understood Bluege's reluctance.

Garland speculated that it was because batters might have bunted on Shepard, figuring he would be slow to get off the mound.

But Shepard was actually quicker on one leg than many players were on two. In one season of minor-league play, he beat out drag bunts and stole five bases wearing the prosthesis.

Through it all, he never felt sorry for himself.

His is an attitude similar to the fictional character "Moonlight" Graham in the film "Field of Dreams." The character, played by Burt Lancaster, appeared in only one half-inning of one big-league game, never coming to bat.

Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, asks Graham, later a small-town doctor, what happened.

"It would kill some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it," Costner's character says in the film. "God, they'd consider it a tragedy."

Graham replies, "Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy."

In 1998, Shepard told Richard Tellis, author of the book "Once Around the Bases," that when his daughter Karen was 10, she said, "Daddy, I'm sorry you lost your leg."

But it was after Senators let him go and he was bouncing around the minor leagues that he came to know the woman he married.

Tellis wrote that Shepard told his young daughter: "I'm not. If I hadn't lost my leg, I wouldn't have met your mother and I wouldn't have you. And I wouldn't take anything in the world for you."

"And that's the way I look at things," he told Tellis.

There are other compelling stories of the history of Washington baseball lost in the mists of time.

Few recall that Curt Flood, the great St. Louis Cardinals center fielder, finished his career with the Senators. Flood broke the back of baseball's "ownership" of players as the drama of his controversial lawsuit against the game played out.

Because of Flood's action, players now may sign with whatever team they wish once their contract runs out. Even though the Supreme Court ruled against his antitrust suit in Flood v. Kuhn in 1972, the reserve clause began to break down a few years later, allowing players to move freely.

A law passed by Congress specifically limiting Major League Baseball's antitrust exemption in labor matters is called the Curt Flood Act of 1998.

In his PBS series "Baseball," historian Ken Burns likened baseball's reserve clause, which bound players to one owner for life unless traded, to slavery.

When Flood, a Gold Glove outfielder and three-time All-Star, was traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1969, he compared "being owned" to "being a slave 100 years ago."

He was released by the Phillies and signed with the Senators in 1971.

This tidbit of Washington baseball history becomes more interesting combined with the perspective of the little-known fact that in 1861, during the Civil War, Union soldiers assigned to protect the District from Confederate forces formed a baseball team called the Washington Nationals.

While he was with the Senators, Flood, floundering as a player and feeling persecuted, suddenly jumped the team in midseason and left the country.

On April 25, 1971, in his last game at RFK Stadium, his skills were clearly eroding.

New York Yankee Curt Blefary hit a soft-line drive to center. Flood dived for the ball and missed. The ball trickled to the wall, and the painfully slow Blefary rounded the bases for an inside-the-park homer as Flood lay crumpled on the grass.

After only 13 games with the Senators, and batting a meager .200, Flood boarded a plane for Majorca, an island in the Mediterranean. He died in relative obscurity in Los Angeles in 1997 at age 59.

But later players had their freedom--and hundreds, perhaps thousands, became multimillionaires--because of what Curt Flood did.

Of course, many now bemoan the big salaries paid to big-leaguers. And there's some irony in the fact that the new team in Flood's final baseball home is one of the lowest-paid.

That will probably change, though, when Major League Baseball chooses an owner for the club.

Staff librarian Craig Schulin contributed to this story.

To reach MICHAEL ZITZ: 540/374-5408 mikez@freelancestar.com