Frank's Place: A Forgotten Hero

Winter seems a little deeper, more barren this year.

It's not just the cold and snow. Here in Philadelphia, the normal spiritual thawing that spring training delivers has been negated by the Phillies' bitter-cold hopelessness.

And so, in search of baseball-related sunshine - and, frankly, a column idea - I reached for Total Baseball, the game's statistical and historical encyclopedia. Perhaps an indiscriminately discovered fact could temper February's icy chill.

Opening the behemoth book to a random page, 920 as it happened, I shut my eyes and blindly poked a finger. Wherever it landed would be this week's subject.

It turned out to be a remarkably lucky stab.

Between Jack Graney and Jimmy Grant, my finger had settled atop a journeyman infielder named Eddie Grant. The name meant nothing then. Before too long, I was wondering why.

Though a Phillies history buff, I couldn't recall Grant, who, as their third baseman, compiled a few impressive statistics.

More interesting, as I soon discovered, he was a Harvard graduate, a practicing attorney, an Army captain, and baseball's first World War I fatality.

The more I looked, the more compelling he became, his story including a search for the Lost Battalion, a stolen Polo Grounds monument, and a baseball curse.

Grant was born in Franklin, Mass., in 1883, three days before the Brooklyn Bridge opened. He went to a private school, then on to Harvard.

A collegiate baseball and basketball player, he earned a bachelor's degree in 1905 and, four years later, well into his baseball career, a Harvard law degree.

Playing in a New England independent league, Grant was signed by the Indians when their star, Nap Lajoie, fell ill late in 1905.

By 1907, he was in Philadelphia, where he would be the Phillies regular third baseman from 1908 through 1910.

A leadoff hitter, he had the most at-bats in the National League in 1908 (598) and the most plate appearances (700) a year later. Despite 35 errors in 1908, Grant also would lead the league in putouts in 1910.

Offensively, his finest season was 1910, when he hit .268, stole 25 bases, and drove in 67 runs.

Obviously blessed with physical and intellectual abilities, Grant appears to have been shortchanged in looks. He had big ears that jutted straight out and a face that charitably can be described as homely.

One photo shows him sitting in a dugout as the index finger of an unseen teammate points oddly at his head. In another, he is in his Army uniform, a pipe jutting from his mouth.

Nicknamed "Harvard Eddie," he reportedly was so well-educated that instead of yelling the ungrammatical "I got it!" while circling under a pop-up, he preferred, "I have it!"

Traded to Cincinnati in 1911, Grant moved on to John McGraw's New York Giants in 1913. Primarily a substitute, he appeared twice in that year's World Series. He retired in 1915.

Back in Boston, Grant opened his own law office. But when the United States entered World War I in 1917, he was among the first to enlist. Likely because of his Harvard education, he was commissioned a captain in the 77th Infantry, the Statue of Liberty Division.

Early in October 1918, the 77th encountered Germans in the Argonne Forest. The fighting was fierce. Nearly 200 Americans were killed, scores more captured.

Grant survived. As his decimated division attempted to regroup, a large chunk wandered beyond Allied lines and soon found itself isolated and surrounded by the enemy.

Since Grant's immediate superiors had been killed, he took charge and led a contingent on a mission to rescue what newspapers called the Lost Battalion.

"Eddie was dog-tired," a division soldier later recounted of that mission. "He staggered from weakness at first, but pretty soon he was marching briskly with his head up."

A German shell burst nearby. According to a SABR biography project account, Grant was calling for stretcher-bearers when a second mortar exploded, killing him instantly.

His fascinating story didn't stop with his burial at the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery.

One of the war's three baseball-related fatalities, he became in death the celebrity he rarely had been in life. His high school named its baseball field after him. A new Bronx roadway was christened the Edward L. Grant Highway.

Then, on Memorial Day 1921, during a Polo Grounds ceremony attended by Grant's family and Army officials, the Giants dedicated a center-field monument to the fallen hero.

Thirty-six years later, just before the Giants' 1957 relocation to San Francisco, the memorial was stolen.

It was lost for decades until, in 1999, a new homeowner in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., reported finding it, hidden in the ceiling of a house once owned by a retired New York City policeman.

Some memorabilia experts who examined a photo of the located monument were dubious, suggesting it was more likely a prototype. Others insisted the relic was real.

Whatever the case, over the years the San Francisco Giants consistently refused requests from veterans organizations to install a duplicate Grant memorial.

Since the team's last World Series win had come in 1954, three years before the monument vanished, a theory developed, dubbed the Curse of Eddie Grant, that the ill fortune stemmed from that refusal.

Eventually, the Giants relented. When AT&T Park opened in 2000, there was a replica Grant plaque. In 2010, the curse lifted, the Giants ended their 56-year World Series drought.

I don't know whether the erudite Grant studied Thomas More. But there's a More quote I recall from high school that speaks to his forgotten glory, the kind that history, thanks to references such as Total Baseball, still can yield:

"Oh, breathe not his name! Let it sleep in the shade,

"Where cold and unhonored his relics are laid."