The storied history of the Yankees is dominated in the popular perception by the team’s legends, from Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, to Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, to Derek Jeter and Aaron Judge. But baseball is played with nine to a side, and even these superstars couldn’t raise the Yankees to fantastic heights on their own. There have always been great supporting players anchoring each great Yankees squad, players that may not have dominated the spotlight, but made important contributions all their own.
One of those players was Tommy Henrich, who we ranked 37th on our Top 100 countdown a few years back. An outfielder who played during a time when mythical figures like DiMaggio and Mantle roamed the grass at Yankee Stadium, Henrich was a superlative performer in his own right, one who was invaluable as the Yankees piled up championships in their glory years.
Thomas David Henrich
Born: February 20, 1913 (Massillon, OH)
Died: December 1, 2009 (Beavercreek, OH)
Yankees Tenure: 1937-50
Thomas Henrich was born in Massillon, Ohio, a city 50 miles south of Cleveland. Massillon was a football town, and Henrich’s high school, St. John’s Catholic High School, didn’t even have a baseball team, so Henrich grew up largely playing softball. Henrich would play semipro ball after graduating and caught the eye of a Detroit Tigers scout, spurning Detroit’s advances but eventually signing with Cleveland in 1933.
In Cleveland’s system, Henrich didn’t look like a man who played little baseball growing up. He hit .325 in his first year in the minors, and hit .337 in 1935. He was one of the best players in the minors by 1936, hitting .346/.411/.560 with 15 homers and 100 RBI across 157 games.
Yet Cleveland didn’t show much interest in promoting Henrich to the show, as the team tried to sell his contract to the Milwaukee Brewers. He and his father wrote to a letter Commissioner Kenesaw Landis, arguing that Cleveland was denying Henrich a shot at the majors that he obviously deserved. Landis ruled in Henrich’s favor, and Henrich became the first free agent in MLB history.
Given Henrich’s stellar record in the minors, there was quite a bidding war for his services when he suddenly hit the open market. The New York Giants offered Henrich a $15,000 bonus, a hefty sum for 1937. But Henrich had eyes for a different New York club. Despite growing up in Ohio, Henrich had been a Yankees fan, awed by the exploits of Babe Ruth. The Yankees offered him a staggering $25,000, and Henrich was off to the Bronx.
The little kid from Massillon arrived in New York confident. He told Arthur Daley and the New York Times, of the time he checked into his hotel in Manhattan:
I still have a vivid memory of coming to town for the first time and checking into the Hotel New Yorker. The bellhop took my bag and discovered who I was before we even reached the room. ‘So you’re the new Yankee outfielder,’ he said, sneering at me. ‘How can you break in ahead of—let’s see, who we’ve got—Joe DiMaggio, Jake Powell, Myril Hoag, George Selkirk and Roy Johnson? Did you ever see them guys hit?’ Not yet,’ I said bravely, ‘but they never saw me hit either.’
After a brief stint with the Newark Bears, Yankee manager Joe McCarthy called for Henrich, and he made his major-league debut on May 11, 1937. Plugged into a lineup that included a late-career Lou Gehrig and a second-year player named Joe DiMaggio, Henrich more than held his own when his number was called. Henrich would play 67 games as a rookie, hitting a robust .320 with a .972 OPS. The Yankees would win the World Series that year, though Henrich didn’t appear. He would make his first appearance in the Fall Classic the next season, following a similarly strong sophomore campaign that saw Henrich post an .882 OPS. Henrich doubled in his first World Series game, and in the deciding Game 4, Henrich hit a solo home run that would prove to provide the winning run as the Yankees swept away the Cubs for their third-straight title.
Henrich cemented himself early in his career as one of the Yankees’ most consistent producers behind their stars, earning the nickname “Ol Reliable” from Yankee broadcaster Mel Allen. However, a knee injury he picked up as a rookie returned to plague him in his mid-20’s, and though he posted an .800 OPS in 1939 and a .947 figure in 1940, he played in fewer than 100 games each season. He didn’t appear in the 1939 World Series, which the Yankees won to make it a four-peat, before the club finally saw their streak end without a pennant in 1940.
In 1941, Henrich put together the finest overall season of his career to that point, hitting a career-high 31 home runs with an .895 OPS, and adding another World Series home run as the Yankees reclaimed the crown by defeating the Brooklyn Dodgers. Amusingly though, his most memorable play came on a strikeout that should have ended Game 4 in a Dodgers win to tie the series at 2-2. Brooklyn catcher Mickey Owen couldn’t handle Hugh Casey’s low curve and it skipped away from Owen for an error. DiMaggio and company promptly started a rally and by the time the dust had settled, the Yankees had won, 7-4. They won the World Series the next day.
Henrich’s breakout spilled over into the next season as he made his first All-Star team, but his run was cut short as the United States entered World War II. Henrich joined the U.S. Coast Guard in August 1942 and served three years primarily stationed in Michigan.
Henrich returned to the Yankees in 1946 and, at age-33, began an uninterrupted run of success. From 1946 to 1948, Henrich made two All-Star teams and received a smattering of down-ballot MVP votes each year. He appeared in at least 142 games each season, the longest stretch of decent health of his career. And he raked, his .858 OPS over that span 35 percent better than league average, all while providing the excellent outfield defense that he so prided himself on.
He was no longer a role player, a nice background piece behind the Yankees’ cast of legends. Even if the likes of DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and other future Hall-of-Famers took most of the shine, Henrich was a celebrated player in his own right. Casey Stengel, having taken over as manager of the Yankees in 1949, said of his outfielder:
He’s a fine judge of a fly ball. He fields grounders like an infielder. He never makes a wrong throw, and if he comes back to the hotel at 3 in the morning when we’re on the road and says he’s been sitting up with a sick friend, he’s been sitting up with a sick friend.
Stengel’s praise encapsulated what Henrich’s teammates liked most about him; that dependability and reliability. Though injuries finally caught up to him at the end of his career, Henrich produced all the way to the end, as he always had. He dealt with back and toe injuries in 1949, which limited him to 115 games, and his balky left knee, always a lingering issue since he was a rookie, kept him to 75 games in 1950. When on the field, Henrich was still at his best. He managed a combined 680 plate appearances across 1949 and 1950, his final two seasons, and in that span he hit 30 homers, drove in 119 runs, and ran a .936 OPS.
Henrich threw in one more World Series homer in 1949 as the Yankees trumped the Dodgers again — a game-winning clout off Brooklyn’s Don Newcombe to break a scoreless tie and win Game 1. It was the first walk-off shot in the history of the Fall Classic.
Henrich would retire after the 1950 season, having appeared in four World Series, all wins, and having contributed to eight different pennant-winning teams. He hung around baseball for a time, spending a year as a Yankees coach in 1951, going into broadcasting for a couple seasons, and doing a tour as a base coach with the Tigers and Giants. He ultimately seemed more content to stick to the sidelines in retirement, speaking of those golden years when he won ballgames alongside the likes of Gehrig and DiMaggio and Berra. He would become a fixture at Old-Timers’ Days, and wrote two books, The Way to Better Baseball and Five O’Clock Lightning: Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle and the Glory Years of the NY Yankees.
Looking back decades later, it’s easy to wonder about what could have been for Henrich, had he not injured his knee his rookie year, or if he hadn’t lost three prime years to war. It’s not hard to imagine a world where Henrich pushes closer to the inner circle of Yankee greats, or even compiles a reasonable Hall-of-Fame case. But Henrich authored a more than fine career as played. He passed away in Ohio in December of 2009, and was born on this day 113 years ago. Happy birthday to Old Reliable!
References
Edelman, Rob. SABR Bio.
Goldstein, Richard. “Tommy Henrich, Yankees Clutch Hitter, Dies at 96.” New York Times, December 2, 2009.
See more of the “Yankees Birthday of the Day” series here.