“I only caught him at the end,” said Hall of Famer Ted Williams, Grove’s teammate with the Boston Red Sox from 1939-41, “but nobody could throw a baseball any harder.”
Grove’s rise in stature coincided directly with that of his catcher, Cochrane, with the Philadelphia A’s.
“Hardly ever shook him off,” Grove said of Cochrane. “Funny, before I’d even look at him, I had in my mind what I was going to pitch and I’d look up and there’d by Mickey’s signal, just what I was thinking. Like he was reading my mind. That’s the kind of catcher he was.”
Cochrane, one of the fiery leaders of an Athletics club that won three consecutive pennants and two World Series championships from 1929-31, batted .345 during Philadelphia’s dynastic seasons and finished with a .320 career average. He captured American League Most Valuable Player honors in 1928 with Philadelphia and again in 1934 with the Detroit Tigers, who he would later lead to two pennants and a World Series title as player-manager.
“Cochrane was a great inspirational leader,” said the Tigers’ Hall of Fame second baseman Charlie Gehringer. “Boy, he was a hard loser, the hardest loser I think I ever saw. He wouldn’t stand for any tomfoolery. He wanted everybody to put out as hard as they could and he set the example himself.”
The other two inductees in 1947 shared a connection as well. Though they never played together, Frisch and Hubbell will be forever linked as the catalysts for two different eras of championship success at the Polo Grounds.
Nicknamed the “Fordham Flash,” Frisch was a scrappy second baseman who terrorized pitchers both at the plate and on the basepaths. He led the National League in steals in 1921, hits in 1923 and runs scored in 1924, all while leading the Giants to four straight pennants and two World Series titles. He would later capture two more rings as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals’ vaunted “Gashouse Gang.”
“There may never have been a fiercer competitor than Frisch, a money-player and clutch performer without a peer,” claimed Arthur Daley of The New York Times. “He could hit for a higher average and a greater distance. He covered more territory afield than a space cadet. He was a swift and daring base-stealer. He was a great player without a weakness.”