PIE TRAYNOR

By Bart Ripp

To learn more about this Pittsburgh legend, Please click on the above picture to go to the Official Pie Traynor Web Site

When he strolled the streets of Pittsburgh, walking because he never learned
to drive, people shook his hand and saluted him with the greeting:
"Pie Traynor, greatest third baseman of all time."

Baseball fans, immersed in our era's shattered records and staggering
salaries, may never have heard of Pie Traynor.  He has been in the Baseball
Hall of Fame since 1948. Until the last three decades, graced by Brooks
Robinson, George Brett and Mike Schmidt, Traynor was considered the best at
third base, the last stop before home.

Gilded in baseball glory, Traynor has achieved American immortality. He is
on a postage stamp. Traynor, and 19 hallowed ballplayers, as celebrated as Babe Ruth, Jackie
Robinson and Ty Cobb, and as veiled as George Sisler, Josh Gibson and Eddie
Collins, were unveiled in 2001 on a pane of 33-cent postage stamps titled
"Legends of Baseball." These gorgeous stamps, painted by Savannah, Ga.,
artist Joseph Saffold, resemble 1930s trading cards.

The 1920s and '30s were Harold Joseph Traynor's time. Like Honus Wagner and
Roberto Clemente, honored on these stamps, Pie Traynor played all his days,
1920-37, with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Pie's pithy confection of a nickname can be traced to several stories. The
popular notion is that Pie was playing ball in the Boston suburb of
Somerville, at a field supervised by a parish priest named Father Nangle.
The good father's habit was to feed neighborhood players after a game.
Following a victory, the priest asked young Harold what he'd like to eat.
The boy said, "I'll take pie."

An obscure tale concerns Harold's father, Peter Traynor, who was a printer.
Peter Traynor came home one evening and found his son's clothes soiled and
his face smudged from a long day of playing ball.
"You look like pied type," Peter Traynor said, referring to printer's jargon
for jumbled type.

Pie could play. He had a .320 lifetime batting average, with nearly three
times as many triples (164) as home runs (58). In 1,941 games, Traynor
drove home 1,273 runs.

In 10 years that spanned Traynor's peak, for he broke his right arm in a
1934 home-plate collision with Cincinnati catcher Jimmy Wilson, and was
essentially finished as a player, Pie had 1,022 RBI on 53 homers. In a
similar 10-year span, Schmidt knocked in 1,031 runs - on 361 homers.
In 1925, Traynor stroked a single and a home run off the great Walter
Johnson in his first two at-bats in the 1925 World Series, won by Pittsburgh.
In 1927, Traynor and fellow Pirates Hall of Famer Paul Waner shared the same
bat all season. The 42-ounce bat was a discard from an anonymous Boston
Braves outfielder named Tim Hendryx. Sharing one big bat, Waner led the
National League with a .380 batting average and 131 RBI, while Pie mustered
a .342 average and stroked a game-winning single on the season's last day
to propel Pittsburgh to the pennant.
In 1928, Traynor knocked in 124 runs and hit only three homers, while
striking out 10 times. Ten!

His top salary was $42,000 a year. He was considered the sweetest fielding
third baseman until Brooks Robinson. Rogers Hornsby, another old timer on
these postage stamps, was a fearsome right-handed hitter who terrorized
third basemen with sizzling line drives that became doubles and triples.
There was a saying that "Hornsby doubled to left, and Traynor threw him out
at first."

"He was the greatest third baseman ever and one of the greatest all time
players," said Howard Groskloss, who played shortstop and second baseman
next to Traynor for the 1930-32 Pirates. "Pie was just a quiet guy, never
said much except at meetings. He was a fine gentleman. Everyone loved Pie."
After a brief run with the Pirates, Groskloss became a gynecological
surgeon.

Groskloss, 92, lives in Vero Beach, Fla. He is one of the few living
ex-Pirates who played with Traynor.
Traynor managed the Pirates to a 457-406 record in 1934-39.
"When he managed, Pie was too nice a guy," said slugging first baseman Gus
Suhr, now 95 and living in Scottsdale, Ariz. "Pie took a defeat really
hard, but he was too easy on the players."

Traynor retired from the Pirates in 1939. He scouted for the team. He sold
bats and balls at Honus Wagner's Sporting Goods Store in Pittsburgh. He
coached at Duquesne University. He did commercials for American Plumbing & Heating (Who can? Ameri-can!") on
pro wrestling telecasts. He had a sports show on KQV radio, locally
renowned for malapropisms such as calling Yogi Berra "Yoga Berry" and changing
Niagara's college basketball team to "Nicaragua."
"It lifted your spirits to be around Pie," said longtime Pittsburgh
newspaper editor and columnist Roy McHugh. "He was the kind of guy who spoke to
everybody. You'd walk down a street with him and it would take 20 minutes
to go one block. "He'd say, 'How are ya? How are ya, my boy?' in that soft Massachusetts
accent."

Pie never drove a car. He smoked too many cigarettes. He didn't care for the
business baseball became. He thought Paul Waner was a better ballplayer
than Clemente.

Pie Traynor died of emphysema in 1972. He was 72. The Pirates retired his
No. 20. Statues of Wagner and Clemente, Iron City icons, tower over the few
fans who come see the Pirates, swashbuckling in tradition only, in their final
season at Three Rivers Stadium.

McHugh said that many times each day, people would see Traynor on
Pittsburgh's Forbes Street, walking somewhere, and they always said the
same thing:
"Pie Traynor, greatest third baseman of all time."

One day, McHugh was walking up Bigelow Boulevard with the greatest third
baseman of all time. A guy shook Pie's hand and said, "Pie Traynor,
greatest ballplayer of all time."
"No, no, not me," said Pie, ever a gentleman. "There were only two - Wagner
and Cobb. They were the greatest."

The Pirates' greatest third baseman is buried in Pittsburgh next to his wife
Eve. Pie Traynor's last stop was a cemetery with an appropriate name for a
hitter who had a knack for knocking home runs. The place is called Homewood.