Rogers Hornsby

Baseball has lost much of its luster recently, as contract disputes and labor actions overshadow sport. In earlier times, youngsters spent entire summers consumed with the fates of their favorite teams and players. Legendary figures like Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Lou Gehrig in the 1920s and 1930s begat Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial in the 1940s and 1950s. And always baseball boasted characters, those players who garnered as much attention for their personality quirks as they did for their athletic abilities. Dizzy Dean leaps to mind, and Satchel Paige, and Yogi Berra. But perhaps the best of them all, both as a player and as a character, was Texas's own Rogers Hornsby.

Rogers Hornsby was born on April 27, 1896, on a ranch outside of Winters, Texas. A gifted athlete from his earliest years, Hornsby began playing professional baseball in Hugo, Oklahoma and Denison, Texas, before the St. Louis Cardinals of the National League purchased his contract in 1915. He played in his first major league game in September 1915 as a raw but talented nineteen-year-old second baseman, and terrorized pitchers in both the National and American leagues for nearly a quarter of a century thereafter.

Over the course of his twenty-three-year playing career, Hornsby batted .358, second only to Ty Cobb's lifetime average of .367. He won six consecutive batting titles and hit over .400 four times, a feat unequaled by any major league player before or after. In 1924 he set a modern-day record with a .424 batting average; only Ted William's .406 in 1941 has come close since. Hornsby hit with power, too, leading the National League in home runs in 1922 with forty-two and again in 1925, when he hit thirty-nine of his career-total 301. Both years he won the Triple Crown of batting, leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in, and twice received the National League's Most Valuable Player Award. Pitchers feared Hornsby as they feared few other hitters, and rightfully so.

What made Hornsby's accomplishments even more remarkable was the fact that he not only played second base but also managed much of the time. His short temper and low tolerance for anything that might interfere with winning, however, led Hornsby from one ballclub to another over the course of his career. He played for the St. Louis Cardinals, New York Giants, Boston Braves, and Chicago Cubs of the National League, and managed the Cardinals to the World Championship in 1926. After nineteen years in the National League, Hornsby signed with the St. Louis Browns of the American League and played another four years before retiring. In 1942 he was inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame.

Rogers Hornsby retired to Chicago, where he died of a heart attack on January , 1963. He was buried in the family cemetery at Hornsby Bend, Texas, east of Austin. To get there, take 19th Street east out of Austin (it will become FM 969 at the Colorado River), and travel the nine miles to Hornsby Bend.

For more information about Rogers Hornsby, see his autobiography, My Kind of Baseball (McKay, 1953) or the New Handbook of Texas. To learn more about East Texas history, contact the East Texas Historical Association at Stephen F. Austin State University or visit the ETHA web site at http://leonardo.sfasu.edu/etha/.