He’s Keith Hernandez.
He rode across the ranch outside North Fork one day and saw the sign on the oak.
For Sale Dunlap Ranch 4100 Acres
“Well,” the man said to the boy riding horseback at his side, “let’s take a look around, son.”
It was Episode 1, Season 1 of a new show on Zane Grey Theatre, and what the horseman had in common with the namesake of the Western anthology was that he — in real life, not in the make-believe world of 1880s New Mexico — had played pro baseball. What he did not have in common with Zane Grey was that he had made it, if briefly, to the major leagues.
With his customized Winchester in hand, the character Lucas McCain would settle with son Mark on the Dunlap Ranch for six full seasons, or, four seasons more than the actor, Chuck Connors, played in the bigs. Still, just as McCain would always be The Rifleman, Connors would always have been a Brooklyn Dodger, and a Chicago Cub.
Of course, Connors isn’t the only big leaguer to have become, in some form, an actor.
Just Being Himself, As They Say
He began his professional baseball career in 1909, at age 20, for the Class B Tacoma Tigers.
He ended it in 1940, at age 51, for the Class A Memphis Chickasaws.
In between, he became one of few players to record at least one hit in each of five decades of professional baseball.
Though he played in the minors for 28 years, he did spend three seasons in the bigs — all with the Yankees, from 1918 through 1920. His final year with the Yankees, when he shared catching duties with Muddy Ruel, was Babe Ruth’s first in pinstripes. In that year, he watched Ruth break his own home run record of 29 by walloping 51 dingers.
It was in 1928 — the year the Yankees won a second straight World Series — when he found himself on another baseball field and surrounded by other pro players. While toiling for the Los Angeles Angels of the Double-A Pacific Coast League, the catcher had acquainted himself with key people in the movie industry, and now here he was, on a ballfield put to 35mm film, in the cast of Paramount Studios’ Warming Up.
With him were half a dozen other pro ballplayers — some big leaguers, others minor leaguers — each playing himself in the story of a pitcher from small-town America who, while making his mark with a big league team, incurs the wrath of the league’s most feared power hitter, McRae, while also falling for the team owner’s daughter, for whom McRae has the hots.
This was standard fare for a baseball movie: An innocent kid from rural America makes his way to a big league team in the big bad city, where, in the final moments of the big game, he wins the girl — often the team owner’s daughter — by performing heroically while staying true to the values of small-town America: Mom, apple pie, that sort of thing. It was also standard fare to cast professional ballplayers as themselves, or versions of themselves.
The trend had started more than a decade earlier. The 1911 film Hal Chase’s Home Run starred — you guessed it — Hal Chase as himself. The 1914 film Home Run Baker’s Double starred — you guessed it again — Frank “Home Run” Baker as himself. In 1916, Ty Cobb starred as himself in Grantland Rice’s Somewhere in Georgia. In it, a small-town bank clerk (Cobb) signs with the Tigers and is forced to leave his sweetheart behind. In his absence, the crooked cashier tries to seduce the girl. When Cobb returns to play in an exhibition game, the cashier arranges the kidnap of the baseball star. Upon his escape, Cobb pummels his kidnappers and gets to the ballfield just in time to win the game and keep the girl.
The plot, shall we say, would repeat itself.
In 1920’s Headin’ Home, for example, Babe Ruth portrays a Mama-loving boy named Babe who rescues the banker’s daughter from a no-good crook, sets her playboy brother on a righteous path and finally, unsurprisingly, belts the game-winning dinger before ending up with the banker’s daughter.
Like Somewhere in Georgia and Headin’ Home, the movie Warming Up was a big deal. Though without dialogue, it was the first Paramount film to match music and sound effects with events onscreen. It didn’t always work. The New York Times wrote in 1928 that “the smack of a ball against the bat is heard some time before (the pitcher) has finished winding up.” Still, in an era that long preceded nightly highlights, audiences were eager to see baseball stories and baseball players on the silver screen.
The studios obliged. And so did the players.
In his role as a ballplayer in Warming Up, the Double-A catcher and former Babe Ruth teammate did well enough to be cast again, in 1929, in the baseball movie Fast Company. Appearing with him, among other ballplayers, was Irish Meusel, the older brother of his onetime Yankees teammate Bob Meusel. Following Fast Company, Truck Hannah would go on to play minor league ball for another decade, finishing, at 51, with that final base hit with the Chickasaws. Fast Company would be his final film.
As for Irish Meusel, who had appeared in two baseball movies prior to Fast Company, he would go on to appear in four more, including Off His Base. Among the other players to appear in Off His Base — including Jim Thorpe, as Jim Thorpe — was a man who appeared in several baseball movies. One, Right Off the Bat, traces his own ascent from hardscrabble childhood to big league stardom.
That’s right: He starred as himself in a movie about himself. Let’s have a look….
Staging a Career, then Screening It
Right Off the Bat tells a heck of a tale. Released in 1915, just one year after the final big league season of its subject and star, the silent film follows a boy who, despite suffering from tuberculosis, must work as a machinist after his parents are killed when he is eight. After getting a job on a westbound train, he remains in California and grows stronger by playing baseball and competing in foot races. At 20 he catches on with the Santa Cruz Sandcrabs, using a red-white-and-blue bat that he named “Dewey” to hit .402 in 29 games.
While in a Santa Cruz jail for drunkenness, he learns of his call-up to the St. Louis Perfectos (a forerunner of the Cardinals) of the National League. Upon reporting to St. Louis’ League Park, he is wearing a newspaper photo of himself — a photo he himself gave to the San Francisco Examiner, saying, “If you put a picture of me in the paper, I know I’ll get a break” — pinned to his lapel. Pointing at the photo, he says to the gatekeeper, “I am Mike Donlin.”
Boy, was he ever.
Nicknamed “Turkey Mike” because of his magnificent strut, Donlin would go on to a decidedly cinematic career: After batting a combined .332 in 265 games from 1899 through 1901, he served six months in prison after urinating in public and accosting a pair of chorus girls during a drinking binge in Baltimore. In 1903, now with the Reds following his release from the Orioles, he finished second for the National League batting title, hitting .351 to Honus Wagner’s .355. The next season, despite having had a gun pulled on him in a Georgia bar, he went on another bender and was subsequently traded to the Giants, even though he had hit .356 with the Reds.
In New York he became a star, batting .356 with 216 hits and a league-best 124 runs scored while leading the Giants to a World Series title in 1905. Local boys copied his strut. The press called him the “Baseball Idol of Manhattan.” Later that year he married Broadway star Mabel Hite. He was handsome, smart, and occasionally sober. He wanted to stay that way. In 1907 he demanded a $600 bonus if he remained a teetotaler all season. The team owner said no.
In a huff, Donlin left baseball and went on the Broadway circuit with his wife. In 1908 he returned to the Giants, logging career highs in games played (155) and RBIs (106) while finishing second in the league in five offensive categories, including batting average (.334). In 1908, however, the showbiz bug bit him again. On Oct. 26, Donlin and Hite’s one-act play, “Stealing Home,” opened in New York. It hit big, playing in front of sold-out theaters from coast to coast. Claiming he could make more money in showbiz than in baseball, he left the game for two full seasons.
Vaudeville couldn’t hold him. In 1911 he returned to baseball, but the hiatus had taken a chunk of his skills and stamina. Though still batting for a high average, .316, he couldn’t stay on the field. Injuries got him. The Giants traded him to the Boston Rustlers. In 1912 the Rustlers sent him to Pittsburgh. That same year, his wife died and he announced his retirement from baseball and the stage. Two years later he was back at both, playing again for the Giants and pairing with teammate Marty McHale in a two-man Vaudeville act titled “Right Off the Bat.”
A year later he was starring in a film by the same name. He was still just 37 years old.
In the years that followed, Donlin would land roles in 66 more films. Onscreen, however, he never became the superstar he might have been in baseball if he had never left for the stage.
Bit Player
The first player to score a run off him in the big leagues? Future Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch.
The second? Future HOFer Joe “Ducky” Medwick.
It happened on Aug. 17, 1934, at Sportsman’s Park III in St. Louis. Having replaced Reggie Grabowski on the mound in the top of the fifth inning against the Cardinals, with Frisch on third base and Medwick on second, the 23-year-old Phillies rookie yielded a one-out double to All-Star first baseman Ripper Collins. Both runs went on the ledger of Grabowski.
The first player to put a run on his ledger? Future HOFer Leo Durocher.
It happened in the eighth, with the Cardinals leading, 10-2. After giving up Durocher’s single to begin the inning, the right-hander coaxed Paul “Daffy” Dean into a pop-up before yielding a run-scoring triple to All-Star second baseman Burgess Whitehead. The next batter, right fielder Jack Rothrock, stroked a sacrifice fly to plate Whitehead. And that was it: After securing the third out on Pat Crawford’s pop-up, the 27-year-old pitcher would never play another game in the big leagues, or even in pro baseball. He would, however, step onto — and into — another field.
Four years later, in 1938, the Philadelphia native appeared in an uncredited role in the boxing movie The Crowd Roars. It would be the first of his 42 films. Five years later, in 1943, he took the field in another uncredited role, as a ballplayer, in the baseball movie Ladies’ Day. Additional uncredited roles would follow — 34, in total. His first credited role was “garage attendant” in a 1958 episode of Perry Mason. A year later he appeared as “Hilton” in an episode of the same show. This began a string of credited, albeit minor, roles in TV shows.
He appeared as the bartender, as Piggo and as Nate the sick man in respective episodes of Have Gun — Will Travel. Later came roles as a prison guard, a poker player and a “bit man.”
By now he’d a made a career — careers, really — of being a bit man. Having appeared in just one major league game — as a mop-up guy — and as little more than a prison guard and poker player in a string of TV shows, he’d had nothing but bit parts before his death at 63. Then again, how many people could say they’d been on the same field as Frisch, Medwick, Durocher and Dazzy Vance — all Hall of Famers — plus Daffy Dean and Dolph Camilli?
How many could say they’d been on the same set as John Wayne (in The Alamo), Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall (Designing Woman), David Niven (Around the World in Eighty Days), Paul Newman (Somebody Up There Likes Me), Gary Cooper (The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell), Lucille Ball (The Fuller Brush Girl), Shirley Temple (The Story of Seabiscuit), Glenn Ford (The Undercover Man), Cary Grant (Destination Tokyo) and Eddie Albert (Ladies’ Day)?
The answer: one, Cy Malis.
Credited or uncredited then, Malis gets credit now. He was close — very close — to greatness.
First Baseman’s Stretch
As a kid growing up in Illinois, he didn’t get to watch TV. His mom wouldn’t allow it.
Two decades later, while living in L.A., he appeared on TV, in episode No. 17 of The Brady Brunch. That same year, 1970, he also led the National League in games played and doubles and accrued a career-high 111 RBIs. In addition, he won the fourth of his six Gold Gloves.
If there really is a “Southern California lifestyle,” he was living it.
Tan and handsome, he had already won a World Series, in 1965, and spent time with SoCal’s most iconic family, the Bradys. His tan and handsome teammate, Don Drysdale, would spend time with the Brady clan nine months later, in September of 1970, but the first baseman was first, portraying himself as the boyfriend of Greg Brady’s math teacher.
“I played myself for 10 seconds.” he would tell an interviewer. “That’s not acting.”
After retiring from baseball in 1972, he landed more challenging roles in Emergency! (as a reporter), McMillan & Wife (as a police officer) and Matt Helm (as Cappy Crawford). In 1976 he earned separate roles in two episodes of Police Story. A year later, in 1977, he landed his first recurring role, on the sitcom All That Glitters. After appearing in episodes of Police Woman and The Six Million Dollar Man, he nabbed roles in TV movies. In 1978’s The Courage and the Passion, he appeared with former football star Don Meredith and the future Freddy Krueger, Robert Englund. In 1979’s Pleasure Cove, he appeared with singer Tom Jones and future TV lifeguard David Hasselhoff.
Following his TV movies, he appeared in one more film, Cry From the Mountain, made by the Billy Graham Evangelical Association. Apart from later voice work in video games, it would be his final role. He had made it to the top of Graham’s mountain but not to Hollywood’s. Still, he could look back and know he’d stepped up his acting game since the time of his appearance on The Brady Bunch, in which Wes Parker played Wes Parker.
“With Gilligaaaannnn … and This Guy Toooooo”
Like teammate Wes Parker, he scored a run in Game Three of the 1965 World Series. Like Parker, too, he used his proximity to Hollywood to land roles on the big and small screens. First came his role as Across, one of the Riddler’s henchmen on Batman.
Kapow, indeed! During the previous year, 1966, the infielder had socked 24 home runs.
Alas…kaput. In 1967, the year of his TV debut, he hit just eight dingers.
Later the same year, “gooba ooba” replaced “kapow!” and “bam!” as operative words when he played one of three Kupaki warriors on an episode of Gilligan’s Island. In it, he and his fellow headhunters — one played by Dodgers teammate Al Ferrara — arrive on the island to find their sacred totem pole defaced. Seeking revenge, they kidnap the Howells and later take captive everyone but Gilligan, who then manages to rid the island of L.A. Dodgers.
After playing a police sergeant in the 1967 movie Riot on Sunset Strip, he took a break from acting even as his baseball career sagged. He finished the 1972 season — his last in the majors — with a line of .201/.271./.337 and then landed a new role, that of an American player in Japan. With the Lotte Orions in 1973, he slugged 29 homers in 111 games. A year later he became the first player to have won both a World Series and a Japan Series.
Upon returning to America, he resumed his acting career, humble though it may have been. He played Sgt. Zurilli in an episode of M*A*S*H and a clown in an episode of Alice. In a pair of St. Elsewhere episodes, he played a psychiatric patient who confesses to an assault.
In 1990, his second year as manager of the Mariners and four years after his appearance on Knight Rider, Jim Lefebvre took his final acting role, as an agent in the sitcom Grand. As for that run in Game Three, it would be his last. Upon stepping on home plate, he bruised a heel and didn’t play for the rest of the series. But he still got the ring.
Damn, Yankees
The early Yankees, like the later Dodgers, enjoyed a decided advantage when it came to landing roles. Following the move from Brooklyn to L.A., the Dodgers could exploit a neighborly standing with Hollywood to supplement their big league incomes with showbiz cash. The Yankees, for their part, could exploit their standing as Yankees.
Following his role in Headin’ Home, Babe Ruth would appear in nine more movies across three decades. In all but one — 1927’s Babe Comes Home, in which he plays Babe Dugan — he played himself. In Slide, Babe, Slide, he is Babe Ruth. In Over The Fence, he is Babe Ruth. In The Pride of the Yankees, about teammate Lou Gehrig, he is Babe Ruth.
Other Yankees would land starring roles, too. In 1962, Columbia Pictures released a film with a buoyant tagline: “A Grand Slam! Fun And Laughter With The Greatest Guys In Baseball … and the luckiest kid in the world!” In it, the lucky kid tells his Little League teammates he is friends with a pair of Yankees stars and will bring them to the team banquet. After mayhem predictably ensues, the kid gets the key line: “Mickey Mantle! Roger Maris! Gosh! Gee!”
The movie, Safe at Home!, did not win an Oscar.
More than two decades earlier, another Yankees star had made his own big-screen debut by starring as a former baseball star who retires to a Western ranch. There, he fends off villains who want to steal his spread and breaks up a racket in stock feed prices. In one scene, he puts his baseball talents to use in the midst of a barroom brawl by throwing billiards balls at people’s noggins.
The year of Rawhide’s release was also the final full season of star Lou Gehrig’s career.
From No-No to Go-Go Bo-Bo
His final role, as a party guest, came in Ron Shelton’s 1999 movie Play It to the Bone.
His first, as a man named Hansen, came in a 1963 episode of The Lloyd Bridges Show titled “The Skippy Maddow Story.” In it, he and real-life battery mate Ed Sadowski appear as baseball players — no surprise there — providing advice to a young diamond hopeful named Skippy Maddox, played by Bridges’ son Beau. Later the same year, the 6-foot-2 southpaw appeared as himself in an episode of 77 Sunset Strip titled “The Left Field Caper.”
Small roles notwithstanding, he was already a star — especially in Los Angeles. A sterling mound effort had elevated his standing, both in baseball and popular culture, and his good looks and charm had made him not only a doyen of Hollywood nightlife but also a top prospect, as it were, for screen stardom. One plan had him co-starring with bombshell Mamie Van Doren in a movie titled Pirate Woman, but private-life chaos put an end to that effort. Other ideas, for television, had him playing himself as a supper club operator in Honolulu, and playing Buddy Solo, a loner on a motorcycle. Neither came to pass.
As his baseball career fizzled, so did his screen career.
In 1967, the same year he went to the Astros in the Rule 5 Draft, the New York native appeared in his penultimate production, a teeny-bopper flick called C’Mon, Let’s Live a Little. In it, just half a decade after throwing his famous no-no, Bo Belinsky plays Bo-Bo, owner of a go-go club.
In his final game that season, he flashed the talent that could have made him a star, pitching nine shutout innings against the team from Tinseltown, the Dodgers.
Alas, he didn’t get the win.
Doctor … Stat!
In 1981, he appeared in a TV movie titled Don’t Look Back, about pitcher Satchel Paige. In 1948 and 1949, he played with Satchel Paige, first on a Cleveland Indians team that won the World Series and then, a year later, on an Indians team that finished third in the American League. In the three decades between his fictional and nonfictional time with the Hall of Fame pitcher, he changed the spelling of his surname and began an acting career that would see him make hundreds of screen appearances and become an iconic soap star.
His first role, as a horse trainer in The Winner’s Circle, came in the year the Indians won the World Series. His second, in 1949, had him back on the ballfield, and in Cleveland, in the baseball movie The Kid from Cleveland. The setting might have felt familiar to the 5-foot-11 infielder, but he still extended his range — his acting range — beyond that of Hank Greenberg, Bob Feller and even Paige, who each played himself. The 31-year-old Los Angeles native played a character, instead, named Mac.
In 1952 he retired from baseball after 11 years in the bigs and landed the first of his many TV roles. After playing the character Jose in an episode of The Adventures of Ellery Queen, he appeared on The Abbot and Costello Show and I’m the Law. Next, in 1953, he returned to formulaic baseball fare by appearing in the movie The Kid from Left Field.
Tagline:
“The Wackily Wonderful Story That Waves Pennants In Your Heart!”
Yeah.
Suffice it to say, the Kid from Left Field ended happily. Meanwhile, the kid from second base, third base and shortstop was just getting started. Following a string of uncredited TV roles in 1954, he landed a series of credited roles in 1955, including the recurring role of Rene Simmoneau in The Whistler. After picking up the recurring role of Special Agent Steve Daniels in I Led Three Lives, he landed four separate roles, including the henchman Crane, in episodes of The Cisco Kid. That same year, 1956, he also appeared in multiple roles in The Lone Ranger and Annie Oakley, including that of the henchman Gorman. By all indications, he was good at playing a henchman.
Then in 1963, after appearing in nearly 80 TV series, he landed the role of Dr. Steve Hardy on fledgling soap opera General Hospital. Former ballplayer Johnny Berardino — now actor John Beradino — would play the surgeon for the next 33 years. In the end, Berardino/Beradino wouldn’t reach the Baseball Hall of Fame like teammate Paige, but today he is the only man with a World Series ring and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Lights … Cameo … Action!
Long is the list of major leaguers who made cameos, often as themselves, on TV shows. Shorter is the list of those who played fictional characters. Sandy Koufax played himself on Dennis the Menace and Mr. Ed but also a cowboy on Colt .45 and a cop on 77 Sunset Strip. Warren Spahn served in the U.S. Army during World War II, earning a Purple Heart and Bronze Star, but in a 1963 episode of Combat!, he found himself cast against type when he portrayed a German soldier. Johnny Bench played a waiter in an episode of The Partridge Family. Barry Bonds played a guy named Barry Larson on Beverly Hills 90210.
More common, and perhaps more memorable, are times when players play players — namely, themselves. Keith Hernandez tops them, given his classic line on Seinfeld: “I’m Keith Hernandez.”
In addition to appearing as an animated version of himself on the“Homer at the Bat” episode of The Simpsons, Wade Boggs played Wade Boggs on Cheers. In the episode, Sam Malone’s nemesis extends a goodwill gesture by sending Boggs to the Cheers bar to sign autographs, but when the skeptical Cheers gang is unconvinced he’s really Wade Boggs, they chase him from the bar and steal his wallet. He’s Wade Boggs, all right.
Even managers have gotten in on the act: On WKRP in Cincinnati, Sparky Anderson listens as bombshell Jennifer Marlowe tells him she attended every game when managed the Reds.
“Box 110, Row 6, Seat 8,” he replies.
Long after singling and scoring against future fellow actor Cy Melis, Leo Durocher made appearances, as himself, on Mister Ed, The Munsters and The Beverly Hillbillies. The latter two shows, in 1963 and 1965, take the same narrative path: Durocher thinks he’s discovered new phenoms in Herman Munster and Jethro Clampett.
Durocher: “Where’d you learn to throw like that?”
Jethro: “Huntin’ squirrels.”
To no one’s surprise, both Jethro and Herman fail to pan out.
Also failing to pan out, you might say, were the movie careers of baseball players like Wally Hood, who portrayed himself and other players in four movies in four decades without ever landing a truly theatrical role, in addition to those of more modern players like Reggie Jackson, Steve Yeager, Pete Vuckovich, Steve Garvey, Derek Jeter, Rob Deer, Ken Griffey Jr., et al — in sum, the hundreds of baseball players who, in baseball movies across the seasons, have played hundreds of baseball players.
Conversely, there is one man whose baseball career fizzled but whose film career, to the extent afforded him, flourished, the lone man on this list who never played in the big leagues but became something of a star. Using the name Kid Blue, he began his professional athletic career at age 14 by competing as a prizefighter in open-air arenas throughout L.A. Four years later, in 1916, he joined Rube Foster’s Chicago American Giants as a pitcher, logging a 3-1 record against teams from the Pacific Coast and Northwestern leagues.
One newspaper called him an “18-year-old pitching phenom,” another a “cool clever pitcher with a curve ball and plenty of nerve to use it.” Foster cut the kid loose, though, after finding him with booze. The teen returned home and joined his semi-pro team, batting .438. Then in 1919 — a year before joining the Kansas City Monarchs — he found his way into Hollywood and appeared in his first film, as a train porter in the silent comedy Rowdy Ann.
In 1920, while playing for the Monarchs, he also appeared in his second film, Haunted Spooks. Following one game, a newspaper wrote that the “movie star from the coast, now playing first base for the Monarchs, slammed one out in right field for two sacks.” Perhaps the lure of the screen felt stronger than the pull of the diamond. Perhaps the ceiling of showbiz, despite the institutional racism in Hollywood, seemed higher than that of baseball, where “black and white” served as a term of separation and not simply as the descriptor of a monochrome form of an art.
Whatever the reason, the man once known as Kid Blue left baseball for the silver screen. In the end, Blue Washington would put up a record far less patchy than his baseball stats: 87 films, and, given his role opposite John Wayne in Haunted Gold, the distinction of being one of only two black cowboy sidekicks in Hollywood B-westerns. Now that was a good start.
References & Resources
Charlie Bevis, SABR.org, “Chuck Connors”
Terry Bohn, SABR.org, “Truck Hannah”
Michael Betzold, SABR.org, “Mike Donlin”
Hidden Films.com, “Interview with Wes Parker”
Jeff Katz, Seamheads.com, “Bo Belinsky — Livin’ The Life”
Myrna Oliver, Los Angeles Times, “John Beradino, ‘General Hospital’ Star”
Variety.com, “Beradino’s medicine show runs 30 Years”
Jerry Crasnick, ESPN.com, “Ballplayers turned actors … well, sort of”
Mark V. Perkins, SABR.org, “Edgar ‘Blue’ Washington”
Graham Womack, Baseball Past and Present.com, “Baseball players who starred in movies”
Rob Edelman, Our Game.com, “Baseball Film to 1920”
IMDb.com