By Yours Truly
https://throneberryfields.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-unnatural.html
Ruth Ann Steinhagen, in court.The protagonist of Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel,
The Natural, was based on a major league first baseman who'd suffered an identical fate three
years earlier. As Malamud's fictional live prospect was shot in the stomach in a farm country hotel room en route a tryout with the Cubs, a real-life
ex-Cub was shot in the right side of his chest in a Chicago hotel room.
Roy Hobbs survived and drifted for years before giving baseball one more try with the fictitious New York Knights. Eddie Waitkus survived three
years of combat in the Philippines' jungles during World War II (winning several Bronze Stars) before playing three years with the Cubs prior to his
trade to Philadelphia.
Hobbs' assailant, Harriet Bird, quietly furious over the novice's three-pitch takedown of an obnoxious Babe Ruth stand-in on a wager at a carnival
stop, demanded to know if he'd be the best there ever was. After the young Hobbs answered in the affirmative, she pulled a veil over her face and
shot him with a pistol at point blank range. Then, she committed suicide by jumping out a window.
Waitkus's assailant, nineteen-year-old Ruth Ann Steinhagen, first planned to stab Waitkus until he scurried past her in her room. Then, she retrieved
a rifle and fired at him, after saying she had a surprise for him. At rifle point, she forced him to move toward a window, telling him he'd been "bothering"
her for two years and would now die. Then, she fired. And was too afraid to follow through with her own planned suicide to follow.
Five years ago this month broke the news of Steinhagen's death at 83. She'd lived so deep in obscurity after finishing her three-year sentence to a
psychiatric hospital that the news of her death took three months to break. The
Chicago Tribune learned of it almost by mistake, while researching
death records for different article.
She tended to fall in love with men unattainable. So she told police who arrested her, adding that she'd previously had such feelings for actor Alan
Ladd and for another Cubs infielder, Peanuts Lowrey. They should have felt lucky to escape with their lives. It was Waitkus who provided her most
powerful obsession; her family once said the small apartment into which she moved after Waitkus's trade was made into a shrine to him. Learning
of Waitkus's Lithuanian heritage, Steinhagen taught herself the language and listened to Lithuanian-language radio programs.
A first baseman who didn't fit the stereotype of the power hitter at his position, Waitkus was known even more as a slick, surehanded defender.
He was enjoying a fine 1949 when Steinhagen put paid to it after 54 games. He'd already been an All-Star twice and had a .406 on-base percentage
and 1.6 wins above a replacement level player which might have gone forth to equal his 1948 3.2 WAR had he not been shot.
Waitkus refused to press charges against Steinhagen. As he recuperated, he spoke of the shooting almost as a sadly amusing disruption to his life.
"Once he realised she was not going to be a threat to him," his son, Boulder, Colorado attorney Edward Waitkus, Jr. told the
New York Times, "he
wasn't vengeful or angry. He understood he was a victim based on nothing other than fantasy."
That was a little more than a predecessor such victim could claim. In 1932, Cubs shortstop (and future Red Sox manager) Billy Jurges was shot by
a showgirl named Violet Valli, who was distraught over Jurges wanting to end their relationship. Unlike Steinhagen regarding Waitkus, Valli hadn't
exactly stalked Jurges.
Steinhagen was also ordered to write an autobiographical sketch as part of her sentence. It included a chilling recap of her obsession with Waitkus.
"As time went on," she wrote, "I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy. I knew I would never get to know him in a normal way, so I kept
thinking, I will never get him, and if I can't have him, nobody else can. Then I decided I would kill him. I didn't know how or when, but I knew I
would kill him."
She failed, just as Harriet Bird failed to kill Roy Hobbs, though neither the fiction character nor the real ballplayer quite knew what hit him. (Valli had
thoughts of suicide, too, leaving a note blaming Jurges's teammate Kiki Cuyler for the souring of their romance.)
Malmaud's protagonist eventually came in from the psychological wandering cold to become a power hitting sensation with the Knights. He discovered
the hard way that his past caught up to him, collapsing from internal bleeding thanks to the long-embedded bullet, and discovering a corrupt newspaper
columnist threatening to expose the old wound and imply improprieties between him and the late Ms. Bird.
In the novel, Hobbs agrees to a delicious payoff to throw the final game of the season, a game that stood to mean the pennant for the Knights, then
chokes on that acceptance and disappears into oblivion. In the film, Hobbs rejects the bribe and struggles his way to hitting the pennant-winning,
stadium lights-shattering bomb.
Waitkus faced neither a bribery attempt nor a chance at such heroics, though he was one direct beneficiary of a near-Hobbsian moment when the Phillies'
Whiz Kids---for whom he led with 102 runs scored---won the 1950 National League pennant on the final day.
He was on second with one out and Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn on first in the top of the tenth. (Ashburn's bunt attempt forced Hall of Famer Robin
Roberts---who'd led off with a single---out at third.) Dick Sisler hit a three-run homer off Don Newcombe to put the Phillies up, 4-1, to stay. Earning
them nothing but the honour of being swept by the Yankees in the World Series.
Waitkus played six seasons after the shooting, which caused injuries enough to require multiple surgeries. His son told the
Times he suffered post-
traumatic stress syndrome, likely as a result of his war experiences and the shooting, not to mention the drinking into which he deepened, trying
to fight the anxieties and depressions that followed the shooting.
It may have cost him his marriage and a job or three outside baseball, though he found some success working for one of Ted Williams's baseball
camps. A hip injury while fixing a house worsened him; he'd quit drinking but continued chain smoking, until his death of esophageal cancer at 53
in 1972.
Steinhagen apparently got to live a gentler life after the shooting than her victim did. When she was released from the hospital with charges dropped,
she spoke of returning there to work as an occupational therapist, but she seems to have had a quiet life as a typist, according to several accounts.
The
Times said she lived in complete obscurity with her parents and sister, with whom she moved into a small house on Chicago's north side. She
outlived all three and refused all the years since to talk publicly about Waitkus or anything else.
Roy Hobbs got to return to the farm after his too-long-delayed baseball chance ended so prematurely. He got to return there to the girl he'd left
behind (after seeing her in the Wrigley Field stands unexpectedly, he blasted a home run that shattered the scoreboard clock), becoming a father
to the son he hadn't known previously that he'd sired with her. Eddie Waitkus should only have had such a gentle aftermath to his baseball career
and for his life.
Ruth Ann Steinhagen died after suffering a subdural hematoma in a fall. "She chose to live in the shadows," wrote Waitkus biographer John Theodore
of her (in
Baseball's Natural), "and she did a good job of it."
Eddie Waitkus, early 1949.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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