Van Lingle Mungo, born 100 years ago today, pitched for 14 seasons (1931-43,1945) for the Brooklyn Dodgers and NY Giants. While he wasn’t a superstar, he did win 120 games, including four seasons of 16 or more victories.
Somewhere I have a paper I delivered, deconstructing the out the Dave Frishberg song about players from the 40s-60s, but in the meantime, this is from Wikipedia:
Mungo was largely forgotten after he retired from baseball after the 1945 season, but was brought back into considerable notoriety in 1969 because of the use of his prosodic name as the title of a novelty song by Dave Frishberg. The song lyrics consist entirely of the names of baseball players of the 1940s, strung together with a bossa nova beat, but Mungo is one of only five players mentioned more than once and his name functions as a kind of refrain. According to Frishberg, The Dick Cavett Show arranged to have him sing the song to Mungo in person, and Mungo asked him backstage if there would ever be any financial remuneration for the use of his name in the song. Frishberg told him no, but maybe Mungo could make some money if he wrote a song called “Dave Frishberg.” Ironically, today Mungo is remembered primarily because of the song.
Also born this day in 1925, Eddie Gaedel, the midget signed by Bill Veeck for the St. Louis browns in 1951. Gaedel appeared as a pinch hitter in the Aug. 19 game against the Detroit Tigers and, predictably, walked. That was it. He was drummed out of the game “in the best interests of baseball.” Although there’s no book specifically about him, Gaedel is included in many books about the humorous aspects of the sport, as well as appearing as himself in a handful of novels.
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