Frank's Place: When a Phillie of great promise died young
Six husky pallbearers carried Yordano Ventura's coffin Tuesday down a narrow Dominican road crowded with mourners. That scene from the 25-year-old Kansas City pitcher's heartbreaking funeral brought to life a verse from the poem "To an Athlete Dying Young":
Six husky pallbearers carried Yordano Ventura's coffin Tuesday down a narrow Dominican road crowded with mourners.
That scene from the 25-year-old Kansas City pitcher's heartbreaking funeral brought to life a verse from the poem "To an Athlete Dying Young":
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Ventura was killed last weekend when his speeding Jeep overturned on a foggy mountain road in his native land.
He was hardly the first young athlete transported into that "stiller town" by a fast car. Youth and promise are often no match for speed and recklessness.
Pelle Lindbergh, Nick Adenhart, Eddie Griffin, Drazen Petrovic, and Jerome Brown are just a few of the talents who have died prematurely in vehicular accidents.
Nearly 90 years ago, when cars weren't so fast nor salaries so high, Philadelphia had to deal with a similar tragedy, a freakish accident that killed an up-and-coming baseball star.
In October 1929, just before the stock market crashed, 26-year-old Walt "Peck" Lerian completed his second season with the Phillies.
A tall and rangy catcher from Baltimore, he was by all accounts a pious gentleman. He attended Catholic Mass each morning, and lived with and supported his widowed mother and younger siblngs.
Lerian hit .272 and .223 in his first two seasons here, but those modest numbers were outweighed by baseball smarts, a powerful arm, superior defensive skills, and the ability to control a game.
According to his Society for American Baseball Research biography, Lerian's catching talents did not go unnoticed.
Giants manager John McGraw, who always prized baseball IQ, reportedly tried to arrange a trade for him. Gruff Rogers Hornsby called Lerian the best young catcher he'd seen "in quite a while." And in 1929, the New York Times selected him as the NL's top defensive catcher.
That '29 season, in which the fifth-place Phillies ended a run of three consecutive last-place finishes, would be a particularly star-crossed year for both the team and Lerian.
Before it began, minor-league pitcher Dutch Ulrich, who had won a total of 19 games for the big-league Phils in 1926 and 1927, succumbed to pleurisy at 29.
Then, as he traveled to the Phillies' spring-training site in Winter Haven, Fla., Tommy Thevenow flipped his car near Lakeland. The shortstop survived but missed three months of the season.
Lerian, meanwhile, was engaged to a Philadelphia woman he'd met during his rookie season. But in that same cruel winter of 1929, she fell ill and died.
Still distraught over his fiancee's death, he traveled to spring training with the team. When the Phillies train arrived in Winter Haven, his trunk, containing all his baseball equipment, was missing. It was never found and Lerian had to buy or borrow new gear.
That season ended with a desultory Baker Bowl doubleheader against the Giants. Lerian went 1 for 3 in the Phils' 71st and final victory.
It would be his last game.
He lingered in Philadelphia to watch the Athletics beat the Cubs in Game 3 of the World Series, then returned to Baltimore.
On Oct. 21, he went to morning Mass at St. Martin's Church. According to SABR researcher T. Scott Brandon, the pastor's sermon urged the attendees to "live an honorable life because no one knows the hour or day that the end may come."
Lerian left the church and walked to a nearby trolley stop at Fayette and Mount Streets. As he waited, a car and a Hecht's department store delivery truck screeched toward each other.
The truck swerved to avoid a collision, veered away from a group of youngsters, and jumped the curb. It slammed into Lerian just before it tore a hole in the brick wall he was standing against.
The impact fractured his skull, broke several bones, and caused considerable internal injury. Lerian was trapped between the wall and the truck and firefighters and police worked 90 minutes to free him.
As news of an accident involving a popular local baseball star spread, 56 people volunteered to donate blood. The victim received a transfusion after being rushed to Franklin Square Hospital.
It didn't work, and at 12:30 p.m Lerian died.
The news shocked Philadelphia and the Phillies who, without their young catcher in 1930, would slip back into their more familiar eighth place.
"To think that such a nice young fellow who was in the prime of life just a few hours ago can be so suddenly taken out of life," said Phils president William Baker.
Eventually, Hecht's was ordered to pay Lerian's mother $22,500. The truck driver was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and given probation.
More than 1,000 people attended Lerian's funeral at St. Martin's. Among the baseball luminaries who praised him was McGraw.
"He was the future catching star of the National League," he said.
Death didn't wait for Lerian's future, and less than five years later it would come for the 60-year-old McGraw as well.
The legendary Giants manager was buried in Baltimore's New Cathedral Cemetery. The curious still visit his grand hillside mausoleum.
Just a short walk away, unnoticed and unremarkable 88 years after his premature death, sits a simple tombstone adorned only with the name of the extinguished baseball talent buried there:
"Lerian."
@philafitz