Call a major-league pitcher “a barber” today, it would likely mean he could cut his teammates’ hair… I know, “hair stylist” is more politically correct. However, a few editions back in baseball’s dictionary, you’ll find “THE barber.”
His name was Sal Maglie. His nickname had nothing to do with cutting hair, but everything to do with “shaving” batters who leaned too far on the inside part of the plate, exposing themselves to “brushback” or “knockdown” or “beanball” pitches. If the ball hit the batter, it came with the job.
The meaning of Maglie was just mean. In his era, he pitched a game rarely played today — at least not without severe consequences like ejections or suspensions, or both. Now, the inside part of the plate does NOT belong to the pitcher.
They say nobody owned it more than Maglie. In his footsteps followed feared pitchers like Don Drysdale and Bob Gibson, whose nicknames (Big D and Bullet Bob) were less ominous than “The Barber.” One hitter, Danny Litwhiler, said of Maglie: “if you try to dig in on him, there goes your Adam’s apple. He’s gonna win if it kills you and him both.”
As much as Maglie was a pitcher from another time, he was a pitcher before his time. He was a rookie at 28, then was banned from the majors for five years as “a jumper” who went to the Mexican League for more money. There, he played two seasons for the Cuban team Cienfuegos. When he returned, still banned, he had nowhere to play. Nowhere became Quebec, where he led the Drummondville Cubs to a Provincial League title that eventually led him back to the New York Giants.
Maglie, the last pitcher to play for all three New York teams before the Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers left it all to the Yankees, became a star. He’d have won the Cy Young Award in 1951 if there’d been one; his 23 victories carried the Giants to the World Series.
Yet Maglie’s career highlights were mostly forgotten, specifically in three of baseball’s most famous games. The day of Bobby Thomson’s historic home run — “The Giants won the pennant, the Giants won the pennant…” — Maglie threw all but four pitches for the winners that day, setting the stage for Thomson. Three years later, in the World Series, Maglie was given the hook one batter before Cleveland’s Vic Wertz clobbered a ball that Willie Mays famously caught with his back to home plate. And two years after that, when the Yankees’ Don Larsen pitched what is still the only perfect game in World Series history, the complete-game pitcher who gave up just two runs and five hits that day was Maglie.
Actually, I remember that game, having convinced my mother I was too “sick” to return to school after lunch (the World Series was on TV). I did not, however, remember him. How many fans who watch baseball at Sal Maglie Stadium in Niagara Falls, his home from birth to death, know his story?
However, he is so irrelevant today that if you buy his biography, written 23 years ago and 10 years after he died, you’ll pay $49.95.
Maybe he’s not forgotten after all.
