From stltoday.com, some sad news:
Cardinals’ Marty Marion, 1944 MVP, Dies At 94
Marty Marion, known to his peers and a generation of St. Louis Cardinals fans as "Mr. Shortstop," died of an apparent heart attack Tuesday night, according to his family.
Mr. Marion was 94 and lived in Ladue with his wife of 74 years, Mary. According to his family, Mr. Marion's birthdate is Dec. 1, 1916 -- not 1917, as it is listed on baseball-history websites and as it was reported by the Cardinals.
Well, his family would know. Which points to something utterly fascinating -- to me, anyway -- that I discovered a few years ago ...
For many decades, a huge number of baseball players lied about their age.
You remember AgeGate a few years ago? When we discovered just how many players from the Dominican were operating with fake birthdays and sometimes fake names? At the time, there was little or no mention of the fact that European-American players routinely shaved a year or two or three from their ages, beginning way back when and not (mostly) ending until the 1940s or ‘50s.
I conducted a small study, checking the birthdays in a 1940s list of players against the best information we had. And it turned out that something like half the dates were at least one year off. The actual number would be higher, because a number of the players were still alive and hadn’t corrected the figures.
But the fact is that baseball players have always lied about their age if they could get away with it, because younger players are more attractive players. And as we’ve seen so, so many times, athletes will do whatever they think they can get away with, if they think they’ll get an edge.
Marty Marion probably didn’t deserve his 1944 National League MVP Award, and he did benefit from the wartime competition. But by all accounts, “The Octopus” -- at 6’2” he was real big for a shortstop -- was an outstanding defensive player, and I wish I could have seen him. Of course, a lot of fans did see him ...
“I never met the man, but I’ve met scores of Martys in my time in St. Louis and they all told me they were named after Marty Marion,” Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak said today in Florida. “That just tells you what kind of player he was and what kind of impact he had on that generation.”
I’ve always been told that my uncle Marty Ivester was one of those Martys. Considering how much my grandparents loved the St. Louis Cardinals -- how much my grandmother still loves the Cardinals -- it wouldn’t surprise me at all.
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