What was pee wee reese number

I was just a scared kid from Kentucky, and these guys had been up in the majors for a while. I guess it was because I was just such a helluva nice kid - if you'll accept that. A sportswriter asked Pee Wee if he was threatened by Robinson taking his position of shortstop, Reese simply responded, "If he's man enough to take my job, I'm not gonna like it, but, dammit, black or white, he deserves it.

When he finished his career he was top 50 on the Top 1, list and once said, "If I had my career to play over, one thing I'd do differently is swing more. Those 1, walks I got His 1, walks, are also the most in Dodgers history. Copyright Hosted by Hosting 4 Less. Part of the Baseball Almanac Family.

Follow BaseballAlmanac Find us on Facebook. Louis Cardinals in a tight pennant race. The two teams ended the season tied for first place and met in the National League tie-breaker series. It was the first playoff tiebreaker in Major League Baseball history. The Cardinals won the first two games of the best-of-three game series to capture the National League pennant. Click here for the Wikipedia page…. Reese made his debut with Brooklyn on April 23, He played 84 games his rookie season and batted.

By , the 24 year-old was a National League all-star but that was to be his last season in the major leagues for the duration of the war as he joined the Navy. Reese was stationed at Norfolk Naval Air Station in , where he regularly played baseball.

In , he was sent to Hawaii and played for the Aiea Hospital team. This demonstration quieted the fans, and the Reds. Just as significantly, it defined the character and career of Pee Wee Reese, the quietly forceful captain of the postwar Brooklyn Dodgers.

The youngster earned his nickname not for his diminutive size—he was five feet nine inches and weighed pounds when he signed his first professional contract at the age of twenty, and added one inch and twenty pounds when fully grown. Instead, he was called Pee Wee because of his predilection for playing marbles. As a pre-teenager, he was runner-up in a Louisville Courier-Journal pee-wee marbles competition. Pee Wee also loved playing baseball—even though his size prevented him from earning a starting job on the Louisville Manual High School team; he admitted he got into only five games during his senior year.

Fifteen-year-old Pee Wee was in the shot, but was dressed in street clothes. As a boy, Reese helped support his family by delivering newspapers and selling box lunches. After graduating from high school in , he held several jobs, the most prominent of which was as an apprentice cable splicer for the telephone company. In , Reese hit a solid. His fielding percentage was only. At the time, the Colonels had no major-league affiliation. Reportedly, the deal was completed so that the Red Sox would be guaranteed the rights to Reese.

Cronin, who was to keep playing for another six seasons, showed no interest in relinquishing the shortstop position.

Upon consummating the deal, it was decided that Reese would finish the season in Louisville and come to the Dodgers training camp the following spring.

At the time, he was hitting. At the time, Pee Wee was anxious to play in Boston and was disconsolate upon learning of the sale, which was consummated while he was in Kansas City, playing for the American Association All-Stars. Their record the previous season was , good for seventh place. In they were a sixth-place club with an even worse record: Before making it into an in-season box score, Reese was hyped for stardom. Reese is one of the younger users of Louisville Sluggers.

Pee Wee made his Dodgers debut on April 23, The Boston Bees as the Braves were then called were in Brooklyn, and Reese went 1-for-3 with a walk and a run batted in. He also made a throwing error. On May 26 he hit his first big-league home run, a game-winner against the Phillies in the tenth inning that broke a 1—1 deadlock. Then in the bottom of the ninth inning, he homered off Claude Passeau to tie the score at 6—6.

More significant than his hitting, Reese immediately distinguished himself as a slick fielder and first-class base runner. He was particularly adept at turning his back to home plate and scooting into left field to nab a popup, and dashing from his shortstop position to second base to scoop up a grounder headed toward center field and fire the ball to first for the out.

However, due to injury, his rookie season proved to be tough going. Pee Wee was temporarily blinded by the white-shirted fans in the center-field bleachers, and he froze. He was carted off to the Illinois Masonic Hospital, where he remained for two and a half weeks. Upon his return to the lineup, on June 21, Reese promptly singled, doubled, and tripled. Then a broken heel bone, which he sustained while sliding into second base in Brooklyn on August 15, ended his season. These injuries kept Pee Wee out of all but eighty-four games, in which he hit a respectable.

He began the campaign with a brace on his ankle, yet he still played in games. His average, however, dropped to. Later that day, Pat and Pete also wed. The Reeses eventually had two children, Barbara and Mark. After hitting. While returning from Guam on board ship, a fellow Seabee informed him he had just heard that the Dodgers had signed a black ballplayer. Plus, he was a shortstop. Would this player upstage Pee Wee, and take his job?

At first, Reese was disbelieving. After all, blacks could not play beside whites. They would weaken under the pressure of everyday competition, let alone a pennant race. Pee Wee had been taught that, explicitly and implicitly, his entire life.

But of course, the Dodgers had indeed signed Jackie Robinson. Reese returned to the Dodgers for the season, during which he played in games and hit a solid. The following year, he also hit. But his notoriety that season transcended these or any other stats. At the outset of the season, the Dodgers promoted Robinson to the majors. Reese was well aware that some teammates and fans, neighbors and friends, and even family members vehemently opposed his playing with an African-American.

The shortstop was, after all, a product of a segregated Southern culture, and he had never had a catch with an African-American, never had a close relationship with an African-American, and reportedly never had shaken the hand of one. But he was aware of racism American-style. So a sense of fairness had been instilled in him and he was determined to accept his new teammate, no matter what. It was this expression of solidarity on that one May day in Cincinnati that is best remembered today.

Robinson could not recall what Reese said to him—if he said anything. It says Brooklyn on my uniform and Brooklyn on his and I respect him. On one level, this story is apocryphal.