Hugh Casey: The Triumphs and Tragedies of a Brooklyn Dodger

(Hardback)

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Hugh Casey was one of the most colorful members of the iconic Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s, a team that took part in four great pennant races, the first National League playoff series, and two exciting World Series over the course of Caseys career. That famed team included many outsized personalities, including executives Larry MacPhail and Branch Rickey, manager Leo Durocher, and players like Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Dixie Walker, Joe Medwick, and Pete Reiser. In Hugh Casey: The Triumphs and Tragedies of a Brooklyn Dodger, Lyle Spatz details Caseys life and career, from his birth in Atlanta to his suicide in that same city thirty-seven years later. Spatz includes such moments as Caseys famous pitch that got away in Game Four of the 1941 World Series, the numerous brawls and beanball wars in which Casey was frequently involved, and the Southern-born Caseys reaction to Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers. Spatz also reveals how Casey helped to redefine the role of the relief pitcher, twice leading the National League in saves and twice finishing secondif saves had been an official statistic during his lifetime. While this book focuses on Caseys baseball career in Brooklyn, Spatz also covers Caseys often-tragic personal life. He not only ran into trouble with the IRS, he also got into a fistfight with Ernest Hemingway and was charged in a paternity suit that was decided against him. Featuring personal interviews with Caseys son and with former teammate Carl Erskine, this book will fascinate and inform fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers and baseball historians alike.

Reviews

Hugh Casey: The Triumphs and Tragedies of a Brooklyn Dodger is a prolific baseball biographer Lyle Spatz's latest effort, and it rescues another worthy subject of the author from the mists of baseball history. The book contains much game reportage but necessarily so, as Spatz uses it to characterize Casey as a prototype of the relief pitcher role known today as 'closer.' The book also portrays the big hard-drinking Southerner as a tough and fearless competitor; a well-liked restaurateur and supporter of local civic causes; and a key member of teams that led to the establishment of the 19050s Dodgers as a NL powerhouse. Even with the benefit of the subtitle, the reader is shocked and saddened by the account of the pitcher's demise, at age 37. * Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine *
Baseball author and historian Lyle Spatz presents a deeper portrait of the pitcher and the man in his latest biography, Hugh Casey: The Triumph and Tragedies of a Brooklyn Dodger.... Spatzs talent as a researcher shines through in an extensive bibliography. * The Sports Bookie: A sports blog by Bob DAngelo *
With meticulous and absorbing detail, master biographer Lyle Spatz has crafted a memorable portrait of a neglected Brooklyn Dodger hurler. As unfortunate as Caseys life was off the field, Spatz has done an exemplary job of giving his career as a mound craftsman its overdue credit. -- Lee Lowenfish, author of the award-winning biography Branch Rickey: Baseballs Ferocious Gentleman and collaborator with Tom Seaver on The Art of Pitching
For the longest time, Hugh Caseys career was marginalized to a single World Series pitch. Thanks to the research by Lyle Spatz, fans can replay Caseys complete game and his bittersweet life in baseball. -- Mark Langill, team historian, Los Angeles Dodgers

Author Bio

Lyle Spatz is the former longtime chairman of the Society for American Baseball Researchs Baseball Records Committee. He is the author of numerous baseball books, including Historical Dictionary of Baseball (2012) and Willie Keeler: From the Playgrounds of Brooklyn to the Hall of Fame (2015), both published by Rowman & Littlefield. Spatz is also the co-author of 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York (2010), which won SABRs Seymour Medal for best baseball history of the year. Spatzs baseball articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Total Baseball, Baseball Digest, and more. In 2000 he was presented with SABRs highest honor, the Bob Davids Award, and in 2017 he was a recipient of SABR's Henry Chadwick Award, established to honor the game's great researchers.