Lest We Forget: Rocky Colavito

A black-and-white photograph of Colavito in a Cleveland uniform standing in a baseball stadium. Four nuns, one of them holding a baseball bat, stand around him smiling. I had put off an LWF piece on the passing of Rocky Colavito because I was preparing a Bookshelf Conversation with writer and long-time Indians fan Scott Raab. But in my excitement to have my good friend on as a guest, I plum forgot about the Rock.

Colavito died December 10 at the age of 91. He was a slugging outfielder for Cleveland and the Detroit Tigers, with brief stints with the Kansas City Athletics, Chicago White Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers, and New York Yankees.

Born in the Bronx, Colavito had movie-star good looks to go along with a potent bat and rifle arm (he appeared as a pitcher in two games, winning one of them as a member of the Yankees, and gave up just one hit in 5.2 innings). In his 14 seasons in the big leagues, he cracked 374 homers and drove in 1,159 runs. He was a nine-time All Star and finished second in the 1956 AL Rookie of the Year voting. A look at his page on Baseball-Reference shows a lot of impressive numbers, but so far those stats haven’t gotten him into the Hall of Fame.

His trade from the Indians to the Tigers in 1960 was devastating to Indians fans and judged one of the worst deals of all time. It resulted in the downfall of his former team in what became known as “the curse of Rocky Colavito,” which was also the name of a book by Terry Pluto.

He was the subject of two other books: Don’t Knock the Rock: The Rocky Colavito Story (1966 by Gordon Cobbledick) and Rocky Colavito: Cleveland’s Iconic Slugger (2019 by Mark Sommer).

Here’s his obit from The New York Times by Richard Goldstein and another from the Cleveland Plain Dealer website.