Fair glove, weak bat, great skillet

Scene: spring training camp, March, 1960.  Tigers manager Jimmy Dykes talking to reporters.

[Dykes] launched into the hymn that every manager has sung every spring since some prehistoric Berra took his first cut with the shinbone of a dinosaur---Detroit's pitchers will be better, the batters stronger, the outfielders fleeter, the infielders niftier.

"How's your first baseman?" he was asked.

"Bilko?  Fine, he can move around there all right.  Be kind.  Write something nice about him."

That's easy to do.  Stephen Thomas Bilko has been coming up to play first base for one club or another since the dawn of history.  He has hit as high as .360 in the top minors and as low as .220 in the majors.  There are 235 sweet-natured pounds of him.  He needs to feel wanted.

When he was with Cincinnati he shared an apartment with three other players.  Steve did the cooking.  He is a wonderful cook.  His roomates appreciated him and sent him a Mother's Day card, but the Reds sent him to Los Angeles, who sent him to Spokane.

           ---from "Advice to a Rookie" by Red Smith.  In Red Smith on Baseball.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

Lifetime 76HR, .249BA. I think I saw him play once at the old Wrigley Field in Los Angeles during the Angels' first year. He died young, too; 49 years old, per your link. I never knew he could cook; it's the kind of thing the Red Smiths and Jim Murrays (who was writing for the LA Times when Bilko was there) would pick up.