Background
Rogers Hornsby Sr. was born on April 27, 1896 in Winters, Texas, United States. He was the youngest of five children born to Aaron Edward Hornsby, a farmer and rancher, and Mary Dallas Rogers, a homemaker.
1955
1 E 161 St, The Bronx, NY 10451, United States
Joe McCarthy, Bill Terry, Cy Young, Rogers Hornsby, Joe DiMaggio, Jimmie Foxx, unidentified, Carl Hubbell, Mickey Cochrane, Al Simmons, Robert "Lefty" Grove, Joe Cronin, Dazzy Vance, George Sisler, unidentified, George "Hooks" Wiltse, and Ted Lyons pose for a portrait in the dugout prior to Old Timer's Day at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York.
1916
In his first full season in St. Louis Rogers Hornsby poses serenely in the dugout before a game.
1921
Rogers Hornsby
1927
Rogers Hornsby
1933
St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Rogers Hornsby poses for a photo with his son before a ball game in St. Louis, Missouri.
1934
Rogers Hornsby
1955
1 E 161 St, The Bronx, NY 10451, United States
Joe McCarthy, Bill Terry, Cy Young, Rogers Hornsby, Joe DiMaggio, Jimmie Foxx, unidentified, Carl Hubbell, Mickey Cochrane, Al Simmons, Robert "Lefty" Grove, Joe Cronin, Dazzy Vance, George Sisler, unidentified, George "Hooks" Wiltse, and Ted Lyons pose for a portrait in the dugout prior to Old Timer's Day at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York.
1955
1 E 161 St, The Bronx, NY 10451, United States
Bill Dickey and Rogers Hornsby pose for a portrait in the dugout prior to Old Timer's Day at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York.
Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees and Roger Hornsby of the Boston Braves pose for a portrait circa 1928.
Rogers Hornsby of the St. Louis Cardinals poses for a portrait.
1060 W Addison St, Chicago, IL 60613, United States
Rogers Hornsby of the Chicago Cubs poses for an action portrait as he swings in Wrigley Field in Chicago, Illinois.
Rogers Hornsby of the St. Louis Cardinals poses for a portrait.
Rogers Hornsby poses for a portrait.
Hack Wilson and Rogers Hornsby inspect bats in the dugout.
Rogers Hornsby of the St. Louis Cardinals poses in the dugout during a season game.
Rogers Hornsby of the St. Louis Cardinals stands ready at bat during a season game.
Rogers Hornsby holding a baseball bat.
Rogers Hornsby feeding his chickens.
Rogers Hornsby of the Chicago Cubs posing in uniform.
Rogers Hornsby fishing off of Catalina Island.
Hack Wilson, Rogers Hornsby, and Kiki Cuyler in full uniform in a dugout.
NL MVP award
2211 Mckinley Ave, Fort Worth, TX 76164, United States
Hornsby attended North Side High School through the tenth grade.
(Vintage autobiography of a baseball Hall of Famer.)
Vintage autobiography of a baseball Hall of Famer.
https://www.amazon.com/My-War-Baseball-Rogers-Hornsby/dp/B0007DNJAI?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0007DNJAI
1962
Rogers Hornsby Sr. was born on April 27, 1896 in Winters, Texas, United States. He was the youngest of five children born to Aaron Edward Hornsby, a farmer and rancher, and Mary Dallas Rogers, a homemaker.
When Rogers was two years old, his father died, and his mother moved the family from their small farm in Runnels County in west-central Texas back eastward to Travis County, where both father and mother had grown up. A few years later the Hornsbys moved to Fort Worth, a thriving meat-packing center. In Fort Worth, Hornsby attended North Side High School through the tenth grade, worked as a checker at the stockyards, and developed his skills as a baseball player on stockyard and city-league teams.
Hornsby began his professional baseball career in 1914 at the bottom of the minor leagues at Hugo, Oklahoma. That summer and the next season, which he spent at Denison, Texas, in the Western Association, Hornsby batted only .232 and .277 and, playing shortstop most of the time, erred frequently. However, a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals of the National League (NL) liked what he saw in the youngster. Lacking the finances to purchase proven players from the higher minor leagues, the Cardinals paid Denison $500 for Hornsby's contract. During one month of the 1915 season with the St. Louis team, Hornsby could manage only fourteen hits in eighteen games.
Although he had done little to impress Cardinals' manager Miller Huggins, Hornsby was determined to stick in the major leagues. He spent the off-season at his uncle's farm in Lockhart, Texas, eating heartily and gaining at least thirty pounds. When he reported for spring training with the Cardinals in San Antonio, he was bigger and stronger. Standing as far back in the batter's box and as far away from home plate as possible and holding his 36-inch, 38-ounce bat at its end, he repeatedly sent the ball to the far distances of the outfield. Kept on the St. Louis roster when the season began, Hornsby established himself as a big-leaguer, batting .313, which was the fourth-best mark in the league. Although the financially strapped Cardinals remained a run-of-the-mill team, Hornsby emerged as a full-fledged star, averaging .327 in 1917, slumping to .281 in the war-shortened 1918 season, climbing back to .318 in 1919, and then, in 1920, winning his first batting title at .370 and also leading the NL with 98 runs batted in. For the next five seasons, Hornsby led the NL in batting. After .397, .401, and .384 seasons, the Texan reached his peak with a .424 average in 1924, the highest batting average for any major-leaguer in the twentieth century, and came back to hit .405 the next season. He also became the NL's foremost power hitter in a decade when the baseball was livelier, the spitball and other "trick pitches" had been made illegal, and increasing numbers of players were emulating the free-swinging style of Babe Ruth in the American League (AL). Hornsby's forty-two home runs in 1922 and thirty-nine in 1925 were more than anyone other than Ruth had hit up to then.
Settling at second base by 1921, Hornsby was never more than passable as a fielder, but no one doubted his greatness as a hitter. In 1926, he struggled most of the season with a back injury and batted only .317, but as player-manager, he led the Cardinals to their first NL pennant and then to an upset of Ruth and the mighty New York Yankees in a legendary seven-game 1926 World Series.
After the brilliant 1926 World Series triumph, Hornsby quarreled with Cardinals' business manager Branch Rickey and owner Sam Breadon and was traded to the New York Giants. He played one season with the Giants for legendary John McGraw, then was traded to the lowly Boston Braves, where he managed the team for most of the 1928 season and won his seventh and last batting title. Traded yet again, Hornsby helped power the Chicago Cubs to the 1929 NL pennant, and at the end of the following season, succeeded Joe McCarthy as Cubs' manager. His chronic horse-playing and plainspoken ways got him fired midway through the 1932 season. After a brief stint as a player back with the Cardinals, Hornsby took over managership of the woeful St. Louis Browns in the AL. A desultory four years with the Browns ended in July 1937, when he was fired again.
For the next fifteen years, Hornsby was a baseball vagabond, managing in the minor leagues and even briefly in Mexico, and working in radio and television. Finally, after his teams won pennants in the Texas League and Pacific Coast League in 1950 and 1951, he returned to the majors as manager of the Browns. There he lasted only fifty games before he was fired by Bill Veeck, the equally headstrong president of the struggling franchise. Later in that 1952 season, Hornsby signed to manage the NL's Cincinnati Reds; that job lasted only until September 1953, when he was fired again - for the last time. From then on, Hornsby worked in youth baseball clinics in Chicago and as a batting coach for the Cubs and the expansion-franchise New York Mets.
(Autobiography of the controversial Baseball Hall-of-Famer...)
1953(Vintage autobiography of a baseball Hall of Famer.)
1962Hornsby read little and rarely attended motion pictures, convinced that both reading and moviegoing were bad for a hitter's eyesight. He lived by the admonitions of his widowed mother (who died in 1926): shun tobacco and liquor and always tell the truth.
Quotations:
"80% of big-league ballplayers go out to the race track today. Sneak around in sunglasses. Other 20% ain't that holy. Just can't find anybody who'll give 'em free tickets."
"Any ballplayer that don't sign autographs for little kids ain't an American. He's a communist."
"(Ty) Cobb is all wet. He talks about a game which had no night play, a game in which the pitcher had everything his own way. He could apply saliva, tobacco juice, mud, talcum powder, or a file to the ball. He could load it with phonograph needles, raise the seams and do anything else he wished with it. And a ball remained in play until it was ready to break apart. Now the advantage is all with the hitters."
"I always tried to hit the ball back through the box because that is the largest unprotected area."
"I'd rather him (Grover Alexander) pitch a crucial game for me drunk, then anyone I've ever known sober. He was that good."
"I don't like to sound egotistical, but every time I stepped up to the plate with a bat in my hands, I couldn't help but feel sorry for the pitcher."
"I don't want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to go chase it."
"I hustled (on how he was able to hit .424) on everything I hit."
"It doesn't make no difference where I go or what happens, so long as I can play the full nine."
"I've always played hard. If that's rough and tough, I can't help it. I don't believe there's any such thing as a good loser. I wouldn't sit down and play a game of cards with you right now withing wanting to win. If I hadn't felt that way I wouldn't have got very far in baseball."
"I've cheated, or someone on my team has cheated, in almost every single game I've been in."
"I've never been a yes man."
"I've posed with some real major leaguers, not bush leaguers like he (Roger Maris) is. He couldn't carry my bat. He didn't hit in two years what I hit in one."
"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."
"Players who stand flat-footed and swing with their arms are golfers, not hitters."
"The big trouble is not really who isn't in the Hall of Fame, but who is. It was established for a select few."
"The first rule of baseball is to get a good ball to hit."
"The home run became glorified with Babe Ruth. Starting with him, batters have been thinking in terms of how far they could hit the ball, not how often."
"There is no longer any misunderstanding between us (Branch Rickey). I want to have the best year in baseball I have ever had and I want the Cardinals to have the best year it has ever had."
"To be a good hitter you've got to do one thing - get a good ball to hit."
Rogers Hornsby was rumored to be a Ku Klux Klan member.
Rogers Hornsby wanted to play baseball so badly that when he was sixteen he donned a wig, pretended to be a woman, and barnstormed through his native Texas with the Boston Bloomer Girls. As an adult, he cared for nothing except baseball. With few other interests, the gruff, profane, outspoken Hornsby was an early model of an athlete completely dedicated to his sport.
Off the field, Rogers Hornsby was tough and uncompromising.
However admirable in principle strict truthfulness may be, Hornsby frequently came across as caustic, insufferably tactless, and totally insensitive to the opinions and feelings of others. He did indulge in one major vice - gambling on horse races. Although he made some of the biggest salaries of his time, he lost substantially, ran up debts to bookmakers and other players, and repeatedly antagonized club officials and Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's dictatorial commissioner.
Physical Characteristics:
Rogers Hornsby was 5 ft 11 inches (180 cm) tall and weighed 175 lb (79 kg).
Hornsby died of a heart attack.
Quotes from others about the person
Jimmy Dugan: "Are you crying? Are you crying? Are you crying? There's no crying, there's no crying in baseball! Rogers Hornsby was my manager, and he called me a talking pile of pigs! And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me play the game! And did I cry? NO! NO!"
Les Tietje: "But I'll tell you one guy nobody liked and that was our manager Rogers Hornsby. Now there was a real p-r-i-c-k. With Hornsby, except for his Racing Forms, there were no newspapers, no movies, no beer, nothing. Women and horses, that was his downfall."
Anthony J. Connor: "He was a real hard-nosed guy. He ran the clubhouse like a Gestapo camp. You couldn't smoke, drink a soft drink, eat a sandwich. Couldn't read a paper. When you walked in the clubhouse you put your uniform on and got ready to play. What was it! No more kidding around, no joking, no laughing. He was dedicated to the game and made sure you were too. A very serious person."
Lee Allen: "He was frank to the point of being cruel and as subtle as a belch."
Joe Williams: "If consistency is a jewel, then Mr. (Rogers) Hornsby is a whole rope of pearls."
Jack Ryder: "I will concede (Rogers) Hornsby is the most valuable player to himself."
On September 23, 1918, Hornsby married Sarah Elizabeth Martin. They had a son, Rogers Hornsby, Jr. Sarah divorced him in 1923, and on February 29, 1924, Rogers married Jeannette Pennington Hine. Hornsby and Jeanette had a son, Billy, on June 2, 1925. The second marriage also ended in divorce. Hornsby began seeing a woman named Bernadette Harris in 1945. They lived together until Harris committed suicide. On January 27, 1957, Rogers married Marjorie Bernice (Frederick) Hornsby.