1950

Gordie Mueller was born on December 10, 1922, in Baltimore. He attended Blessed Sacrament parochial school for his first eight years, and then four years at Baltimore City College, a high school. He spent three years at Loyola College in Baltimore and had anticipated a career in accounting. Basketball and bowling were his two other sports, but it was really baseball that captivated him from the start. While still in high school he was scouted by Baltimore of the International League and signed with that club in 1941.

He didn’t get much work with the Orioles in ‘41, appearing in only four games for 14 innings, but in 1942 he was assigned to the Class-B Lancaster Red Roses in Pennsylvania (Interstate League) and he worked 106 innings.

In the spring of 1943, he trained with the Baltimore Orioles. He had appeared in six games for Baltimore when he enlisted in the United States Navy for the duration of the Second World War. He spent three years in the Navy from 1943-1945.

It was back to trying to make it in baseball after the war. For the third year, he was 0-1 for Baltimore, in 1946, the same record he had posted in 1941 and 1943. Most of the year was spent with the Wilkes-Barre Barons in the Class-A Eastern League.

He spent the full 1947 season with the Orioles and transitioned to the Boston Red Sox system for 1948, back to the Eastern League and back to Single-A ball, pitching for the Scranton Miners.

The Red Sox brought him to Sarasota in the spring of 1949 to throw batting practice. They moved him back up to Triple A and he had a very good year in 1949 for the Louisville Colonels, with a 10-4 record and a 3.81 ERA. He was added to the Red Sox roster, and brought up to Boston at the end of the ’49 season, though he saw no game duty. 

Gordie worked over the winter of 1949-50 driving an oil truck, but really hoped to make it with the Sox. He was one of seven pitchers also hoping to make the team in 1950 and he did. His debut came in relief in April, during a 16-7 second-game drubbing by the Yankees, in a doubleheader at Fenway Park. He had made the team, but was optioned to Louisville in May, after pitching in five games and accumulating 5 1/3 innings with a 10.13 ERA. 

After a couple of months working for Louisville, he was recalled to Boston in July. But a day or two later, he was optioned to Louisville again. All told, Gordie relieved in 39 games for Louisville in 1950.

In November, his contract was sold outright to Louisville. He worked in 45 games, all but two of them in relief, for the 1951 Colonels, to a 3.64 ERA, and split the 1952 season between Ottawa and back in Baltimore. His arm bothered him and he only got in 20 innings of work. 

Gordie no longer played after the 1952 season. His arm was not what it had been, and he had a growing family. He stayed on the Baltimore roster through the 1953 season, and on the restricted list. His contract was part of a sale of 14 players to Richmond in January 1954, as the St. Louis Browns franchise moved to Baltimore.

At first he went into supervising home construction on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In 1954, he joined Lardner & Wich, a construction firm, and became its executive vice president in 1963 and in the mid-1960s sold and leased commercial real estate for W. C. Pickard & Co.

He was state director for Maryland and Delaware in the International Council of Shopping Centers. For 20 years he ran his own firm, J. Gordon Mueller & Co, which he founded in 1976 and retired from in 1996.

Gordie Mueller died of heart disease on September 7, 2006, at the Stella Maris Hospice in Baltimore.