Touch 'Em All: Fan who shot player, inspired 'The Natural' dies

Ruth Ann Steinhagen inspired a novel and a movie starring Robert Redford when she lured Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus in 1949 into her Chicago hotel room with a cryptic note and shot him, nearly killing him.

After the headlines faded, Steinhagen did something else just as surprising: She disappeared into obscurity, living a quiet life in Chicago until now, more than six decades later, when news broke that she had died three months earlier. The Cook County Medical Examiner's Office said she died of natural causes on Dec. 29 at the age of 83.

Her story, the basis of a Bernard Malamud novel and the 1984 movie The Natural, began with a young woman's crush on Waitkus, whom she'd never met. So complete was this crush that she would set a place for him at the family dinner table, and she turned her bedroom into a shrine to the handsome player.

The story took a fateful turn after the 1948 season, when Waitkus was traded to the Phillies. "That's when she decided to kill him," said John Theodore, author of a 2002 nonfiction book about the crime.

When the Phils went to Chicago to play the Cubs the following season, she checked into the hotel where he was staying and invited him to her room after the June 14, 1949, game at Wrigley Field.

"We're not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about," she wrote in a note. When Waitkus arrived at her room and sat down, she walked to a closet while saying: "I have a surprise for you." She then turned with a rifle and shot him in the chest.

Newspapers devoured the lurid story of a 19-year-old baseball groupie, known in the parlance of the day as a "Baseball Annie." Among the sensational and likely staged photos was one showing her writing in a journal at a table in her jail cell with a framed photograph of Waitkus propped nearby.

A judge determined she was insane and committed her to a mental hospital. She was released three years later, after doctors determined she had regained her sanity. She returned to Chicago and lived as privately as possible.

Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira, who rejoined the club Sunday following the U.S. team's ouster from the World Baseball Classic, said he has a partially torn tendon sheath in his right wrist and could miss up to two months of the regular season. He was hurt March 5, and the injury was initially announced as a strained wrist.

"The tendon is fine," Teixeira said. "The good thing is it's nothing major, nothing where I'm missing a whole season."

Teixeira plans to start limited baseball drills in about a week and was optimistic that surgery will not be necessary.

- Wire reports