Henrich, Yankees Clutch Hitter, Dies

Tommy Henrich, the right fielder known as Old Reliable who helped propel the Yankees to seven World Series championships, died on Tuesday in Dayton, Ohio. He was 96.

His death was announced by the Yankees.

Playing with the Yankees for 11 seasons, Henrich proved a timely hitter, an outstanding defensive player and a leader who epitomized the image of the classy Yankee who was nearly always a winner.

He was part of a celebrated outfield, teaming up with Joe DiMaggio in center and Charlie Keller in left. Making his debut under Manager Joe McCarthy and concluding his career with Casey Stengel’s powerful postwar clubs, he played on Yankee teams that won eight pennants.

Henrich (HEN-rick) batted over .300 three times, with a lifetime average of .282, and he hit 183 home runs. He played from 1937 — he was a teammate of Lou Gehrig’s — to 1950, except for a three-year break for military service in World War II. He was renowned for getting a hit when a game was on the line.

In a 1989 interview with The Chicago Sun-Times, Henrich told of a big hit he had in a game with the Philadelphia Athletics. “The score was tied in the late innings, and the Yankees had to catch a train,” he recalled. “I got a hit that won the game and broadcaster Mel Allen said: ‘Good old reliable Henrich. Looks like we’ll catch the train after all.’ ”

Henrich was born on Feb. 20, 1913, in Massillon, Ohio, a cradle of professional football. There were few good baseball fields around, so he played softball through his high school years, then joined a town baseball team.

He was signed by the Cleveland Indians’ organization in the fall of 1933 and hit well over .300 during three seasons in the minors. But in 1937, he was still a minor leaguer, assigned to Milwaukee of the American Association instead of joining the Indians. He wrote to the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, wondering if he was being treated fairly. Landis ruled that the Indians were improperly denying him an opportunity to play in the majors and said he could sign with any team that wanted him. In April 1937, the Yankees signed him.

“Cleveland was more or less the big local club, the closest one to Massillon, but I’d never been a Cleveland rooter,” Henrich said in “Baseball Between the Lines,” Donald Honig’s oral history of the game in the 1940s and ’50s. “I was a Yankee fan since 1921, when I was 8 years old. I was a Babe Ruth man.”

Playing right field at Yankee Stadium, he succeeded George Selkirk, the man who had taken over the position when Ruth departed.

Henrich was admired by his fellow ballplayers as an exceedingly smart outfielder. He had a strong arm but worked incessantly to develop his skills, studying the way opposing batters hit the ball and gauging wind currents.

He was enmeshed in memorable World Series moments against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

He swung and missed for strike three and what seemed to be the final out of Game 4 in the 1941 Series, but the Dodgers’ catcher, Mickey Owen, committed a passed ball that led to the Yankees’ winning rally. “Even as I was trying to hold up, I was thinking that the ball had broken so fast that Owen might have trouble with it, too,” Henrich remembered in “Baseball Between the Lines.”

“I saw that little white jackrabbit bouncing and I said, ‘Let’s go.’ It rolled all the way to the fence. I could have walked down to first.”

In Game 4 of the 1947 World Series, Cookie Lavagetto’s two-run double breaking up Bill Bevens’s no-hitter with two out in the ninth inning caromed off Henrich’s glove after hitting the right-field wall at Ebbets Field, allowing Brooklyn’s Eddie Miksis to score the winning run.

In the final game of the 1949 season, Henrich hit a home run at Fenway Park in the Yankees’ pennant-winning victory over the Boston Red Sox, and in Game 1 of the 1949 World Series, his ninth-inning home run off the Dodgers’ Don Newcombe brought a 1-0 triumph.

After his playing days ended, Heinrich spent one year as a Yankee coach, tutoring Mickey Mantle in his rookie season. He later coached for the New York Giants and the Detroit Tigers and worked in sports broadcasting.

Henrich’s dedication on the field was matched by a reputation for strength of character. As Stengel put it in a 1949 profile of Henrich in The New Yorker: “He’s a fine judge of a fly ball. He fields grounders like an infielder. He never makes a wrong throw, and if he comes back to the hotel at 3 in the morning when we’re on the road and says he’s been sitting up with a sick friend, he’s been sitting up with a sick friend.” SOURCE