Medford mail tribune., July 05, 1959, Image 42

SPORTS j by Ed Fitzgerald
'it .
f " '
IS LADY LUCK BACK
ON HERB SCORE'S SIDE?
Potentially the best pitcher in baseball today, the
Cleveland left-hander needs only a little good fortune
instead of the bad he's been plagued with most of his life
Going strong again, Herb deserves the lion's
share of good luck for refusing to be discouroged
each time the breaks went against him.
Herbert jude score, the flame-throwing
Cleveland pitcher known as "the left
handed Bob Feller," has been waist-deep in
luck most of his life. The only trouble is, most
of it has been bad. If it ever changes, if he
ever becomes as lucky as he's been unlucky
so far, the American League batters are going
to have a lot of trouble.
The best-known example of Herb's strange
affinity for disaster was the accident he
suffered on the ball field the night of May
7, 1957, during a game between the Indians
and the New York Yankees. With two men
out in the Yankees' half of the first inning,
Gil McDougald, the New York shortstop, -smashed
a smoking line drive that struck
Score full in the right eye. The tall, slim
pitcher sank to the ground as though he had
been hit by a .45-caliber bullet.
Rocky Colavito, Herb's roommate and clos
est buddy, raced in from right field like a
sprinter. As he bent over Score's limp body,
Rocky heard him say, "Hey, St. Jude, stay
with me." St. Jude .is Herb's patron saint;
it's his name that Herb has taken as his own
middle name. When Herb regained his wits,
he said, "It just goes to prove that St. Jude
really is the saint of hopeless cases like me."
He was badly hurt, that was certain. The
ball had crashed squarely against the surface
of bone around his right eye. "It was fortu
nate that the ball hit him flush," eye special
ist Dr. Charles Thomas said. "It caught the
top of the eyebrow bone, the cheekbone, and
the nose, fracturing the nose. The bone
structure of Herb's face absorbed most of the
impact that otherwise would have destroyed
his eye. There was no brain injury."
In the clubhouse, as he lay on a stretcher
waiting to be taken to the hospital, Herb
Joked feebly with Cleveland pitcher Mike
Garcia. "You can't say I didn't keep my eye
on that ball," he said. But he had little to
laugh about. It took a long time to heal the
injury that nearly ended his career.
A 20-game winner in 1956, Herb pitched
no more in 1957; his victories for the season:
two games. In 1958, trying for a comeback,
he was plagued by a badly inflamed elbow
that Anally put him on the voluntary retired
list for most of the. season. Again, he won
only two games. Understandably, people be
gan to wonder if he was all through; if he'd
left his promise on the Cleveland Stadium
mound when that line drive smacked his face.
The tragedy of it was that so much had
been expected of him. Pitchers who can
throw with the blazing speed of Herb Score
come along very seldom. Each generation
produces only a few. The Indians had been
watching Herb ever since his high-school
days in Lake Worth, Fla. Cy Slapnicka, the
famous Cleveland scout who had signed Bob
Feller off his father's farm in Van Meter, la.,
had been tipped off about Score by a Lake
Worth policeman, Tom Nagle. Cy camped on
his doorstep and, when he was ready to sign
a professional contract, got him with $60,000
of the Cleveland club's money.
"He's pretty wild," Slapnicka told Cleve
land newspapermen, "but he's fast. Man,
what an arm. He'll be the greatest."
Maybe cy should have studied the luck of
Herb Score more closely. When he was
three years old, he had been run over by a
truck. Both his legs were crushed just below
the pelvis, and several doctors said they
would have to be amputated to save his life.
They were wrong. But a few months later
he was stricken by rheumatic fever.
In his freshman year in high school, he
tripped and fractured an ankle. Before the
cast came off, he was in the hospital for an
emergency appendectomy. He had pneu
monia twice, as well as an agonizing colon
condition. He was rejected by the Army be
cause of high blood pressure. He suffered a
separation of his left shoulder in a fall.
But Slapnicka didn't have much to worry
about during Score's minor-league appren
ticeship except his wildness. The youngster
had a terrible time learning how to harness
his blinding speed and get the ball over the
plate. He'd always been able to throw hard,
even as a kid pitching for the Holy Name of
Mary' School in Rosedale, Long Island, where
he lived until his home was broken up and
his mother moved to Florida. According to
his mother, he used to throw anything he
could get his hands on.
He liked to hit what he was throwing at,
but control hadn't been so important as it
was now. In organized baseball, the fastest
to
Family Weekly, July 5. 19i