Dick Groat, an eight-time All-Star who won the NL MVP award in 1960 while playing shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, died April 27 at the age of 92. Here’s his obituary by Richard Goldstein in The New York Times. (The Times piece notes he was a five-time All-Star, but I’m saying eight since they played two games each year from 1959-62.)
Groat — who was also an All-American basketball player at Duke in the early 1950s — led the senior circuit in hitting that year with a .325 batting average as the underdog Pirates beat the New York Yankees in dramatic fashion in the World Series. He was also a member of the 1964 World Champion St. Louis Cardinals, who also knocked off the Yankees in the fall classic. All told, he played in 1,929 games for the Pirates, Cardinals, Phillies, and Giants, retiring after the 1967 season.
He parlayed his fame into two books: The World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates (with Bill Surface, which came out in January 1961) and Groat: I Hit and Ran (with Frank Dascenzo, 1978).
It was truly a bittersweet end, if such a thing can be said. From the Times article:
On Tuesday of last week, Groat was at his home in Edgewood, Pa., a Pittsburgh suburb, when the former Pirates pitcher and broadcaster Steve Blass appeared on his doorstep with a camera crew. They informed Groat that he had been elected to the Pirates Hall of Fame, and conducted an impromptu interview.
Two days later, on his way to watch a telecast of the interview before a Pirates game, Groat had a stroke…
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